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Top 10 Richest Football Club Owners In The World (2023)
Are you wondering who is the richest football club owner in the world? Well, we have compiled in this guide a list of the top 10 richest football club owners in the world.
Football clubs are media and entertainment organizations that produce and disseminate visual information both on and off the field.
It is easier to understand the commercial value of football teams and how that value might increase in the future when viewing them from this angle. For the limited time and attention of individuals, they compete with a wider range of businesses.
They face off against media giants like Disney and Netflix, as well as other entertainment businesses like EA Games and Tencent, and even social media giants like Instagram and Tiktok.
In recent times, smart investors opt to invest in and own a soccer team. Football has attracted a lot of billionaire investment. The reason is that they make a ton of money following each move of costly players. The owners of Barcelona, Real Madrid, or Bayern Munich are still often believed to be the richest football club owners in the world. But they were mistaken!
You might be aware of this, football clubs are deeply ingrained organizations with rich histories and cultures. They are connected to their city, odd colours, fervent supporters, historical narratives, and, of course, the 11 players who compete each week on the field for the honour. They compete against clubs from their city and nation. They also compete for international titles with clubs from other countries.
In the sections that follow, we at RNN examine the top 10 richest football club owners in the world and football teams from a business standpoint, go over important aspects of their commercial dynamics, and describe how these dynamics change over time as a result of technology improvements.
Key Takeaways
- The Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia is the richest football club owner in the world
- The Fund is the owner of Newcastle with a whopping $620 billion in assets.
- Sheikh Mansour, the owner of Man City is the richest individual to own a football club
1. Public Investment Fund
Top-10-Richest-Football-Club-Owners-In-The-World-Public-investment-fund
According to Wikipedia, the Public Investment Fund is the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. It is among the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world with total estimated assets of $620 billion (£514 billion).
It was created in 1971 for the purpose of investing funds on behalf of the government of Saudi Arabia. The wealth fund has been controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler since 2015.
The sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia purchased an 80 per cent stake in Newcastle in October 2021 to complete a takeover that had been blocked by the Premier League just six months before. The Public Investment Fund has made major investments in companies and projects around the world, including the United States, Russia, India, France and Brazil among others.
It has received criticism for being one of the least open sovereign wealth funds in the world. The Wall Street Journal observed in 2016 that none of the investments in the fund was identified.
Due to the group’s associations with the Saudi Arabian government and human rights history, its operations have generated controversy. The domestic investments of the fund typically go to businesses run by affluent individuals with a history of close ties to the Saudi government.
After the Saudi regime carried up an “anti-corruption” crackdown in 2017, during which 400 of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest people had their assets seized, some of PIF’s assets were given to the organization.
With estimated total assets of $620 billion, it ranks among the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world. It was established in 1971 with the intention of investing money on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government.
The wealth fund has been controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler since 2015.
2. Sheikh Mansour
Top 10 Richest Football Club Owners In The World-Sheikh-Mansour
Sheikh Mansour also known as Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan is an Emirati politician who serves as deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, minister of presidential affairs, billionaire, and a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi. He was born on November 21, 1970.
He is wed to a daughter of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, and is the brother of Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the current president of the United Arab Emirates.
Sheikh Mansour participates in a number of UAE-based government-owned businesses. He serves as chairman of the Emirates Investment Authority, the Ministerial Development Council, and the Emirates Racing Authority.
He is a member of both the Supreme Council for Financial and Economic Affairs and the Supreme Petroleum Council. Mansour serves on the boards of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADIA).
He serves as vice chairman of the sovereign wealth fund owned by the Emirati government, Mubadala Investment Company. He is the head of the central bank of the UAE. He is second on our list of the top 10 richest football club owners in the world.
Sheikh Mansour owns a variety of clubs through the City Football Group in addition to Manchester City, the Premier League team for which he is best known.
In addition to Man City, Sheikh Mansour’s City Football Group also includes the A-League team Melbourne City and the Major League Soccer team New York City. The other teams include the Indian group Mumbai City, the Belgian group Lommel SK, and the Uruguayan group Montevideo City Torque.
3. Dietrich Mateschitz
Top 10 Richest Football Club Owners In The World-Dietrich-Mateschitz
Dietrich Mateschitz has a net worth of $19.4 billion. He co-founded Red Bull GmbH and owned 49% of it. Mateschitz’s net worth was calculated at US$27.4 billion in April 2022.
Mateschitz was a marketer for Blendax and Unilever. He discovered the beverage Krating Daeng while travelling in Thailand, which he transformed into Red Bull. In 1984, he established Red Bull GmbH, and in 1987, he introduced it to Austria.
The five-time Formula One Constructors’ Champions Red Bull Racing and sister team AlphaTauri, as well as association football teams FC Red Bull Salzburg and RB Leipzig, were all acquired by or formed by his firm.
Unilever was Mateschitz’s first employment, and he worked there promoting detergents. Later, he relocated to Blendax, a German cosmetics business that Procter & Gamble later acquired, where he worked on the marketing of Blendax toothpaste, among other things. He is third on our list of the top 10 richest football club owners in the world.
On his way from the Bangkok airport to the city centre while on business with Blendax, Mateschitz purchased a bottle of Krating Daeng, the beverage that would eventually become Red Bull.
Dietrich Mateschitz has amassed a sizable portfolio of sports teams, many of which are branded with his company’s name. His major football concerns are the MLS team New York Red Bulls, Austrian club Red Bull Salzburg, and Bundesliga team RB Leipzig.
4. Andrea Agnelli (and family)
Top 10 Richest Football Club Owners In The World-andrea-agnelli
Andrea Agnelli is an Italian businessman. From May 2010 until his resignation in November 2022, Agnelli presided over the Italian football club Juventus F.C. The Turin Public Prosecutor’s Office had initiated a Financial Accounts Probe after receiving information that suggested intentional wrongdoing in accounting.
The Agnelli family are the owners of Juventus, with Andrea Agnelli being the face of the family’s football enterprise, serving as chairman of both the club and the European Club Association (ECA).
The Agnelli family, a well-known industrialist family, has a wide range of economic activities, but they are mainly associated with the automotive sector because they create brands like Fiat, Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, and others. He is fourth on our list of the top 10 richest football club owners in the world.
After graduating from college, Agnelli began working for firms like Iveco and Auchan Hypermarché in England and France. Additionally, he worked in marketing and development for Ferrari Idea S.A. and Lausanne-based Philip Morris International for a number of years in Switzerland.
Agnelli was appointed to the UEFA Executive Committee in 2015 and previously held the positions of Executive Member and Chairman of the European Club Association. He comes from the family of industrialist Agnelli. Additionally, he serves on the boards of Stellantis and Exor.
5. Dietmar Hopp
Top 10 Richest Football Club Owners In The World-Dietmar-Hopp
Dietmar Hopp is among the richest football club owners in the world. He is a German software engineer and billionaire businessman. Along with former IBM employees Hans Werner Hector, Klaus Tschira, Claus Wellenreuther, and Hasso Plattner, he was one of the founders of SAP SE in 1972.
He was also the owner of the Bundesliga soccer team TSG 1899 Hoffenheim. Bundesliga group, although Dietmar Hopp, the owner of Hoffenheim, did not help start SAP SE, he is a well-respected businessman in the software and data processing industry despite Hoffenheim’s lack of international prominence.
Despite receiving harsh criticism from German football fans for allegedly investing close to $400 million in Hoffenheim, Hopp remained prominent in the pursuit of a coronavirus vaccine in 2020. He is fifth on our list of the top 10 richest football club owners in the world.
Hopp was raised in the little town of Hoffenheim in the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg. In November 1938, during the Kristallnacht pogrom, his father, Emil Hopp, was a Truppführer of the Nazi Party paramilitary group Sturmabteilung and oversaw the burning of a synagogue in Hoffenheim as its commanding officer.
He studied telecommunications engineering in Karlsruhe from the time he received his Abitur as a high school graduate until 1966. He worked for IBM as a software developer and consultant after graduating from college.
6. Philip Anschutz
Top 10 Richest Football Club Owners In The World-Philip-Anschutz
Philip Frederick Anschutz is an American billionaire businessman who owns or controls companies in a variety of industries, including energy, railroads, real estate, sports, newspapers, movies, theatres, arenas and music.
He bought the parent firm of the Journal Newspapers in 2004, and under his leadership, Washington Examiner, an American conservative editorial daily, was created.
Philip Anschutz, a Major League Soccer founding member, currently owns the well-known LA Galaxy, but he formerly controlled a number of other teams in the league, including MetroStars, Chicago Fire, and others.
He is sixth on our list of the top 10 richest football club owners in the world. The real estate, oil, rail, and entertainment sectors are where the American billionaire has his primary economic interests.
For $10 million, Anschutz acquired the 250,000-acre (1,000 km2) Baughman Farms in Liberal, Kansas, one of the biggest farming conglomerates in the nation. He bought 9 million acres (36,000 km2) along the Utah-Wyoming boundary the next year. His first oil industry riches resulted from this.
Since Prudhoe Bay in Alaska in 1968, the Anschutz Ranch’s billion-barrel (160,000,000 m3) oil pocket has been the largest oil field discovery in the United States. This was discovered in the early 1980s. Mobil Oil purchased a stake in it from Anschutz in 1982 for $500 million.
Anschutz was Colorado’s only billionaire for a while. He became one of the top 100 landowners in the country after purchasing property in other Western states.
7. Stan Kroenke
Top 10 Richest Football Club Owners In The World-stan-kroenke
Stan Kroenke is one of the richest football club owners in the world. He is the owner of Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, the holding company for the Los Angeles Gladiators of the Overwatch League, the Los Angeles Guerrillas of the Call of Duty League, the Denver Nuggets of the NBA, the Colorado Avalanche of the NHL, the Colorado Rapids of Major League Soccer, the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League, and Arsenal F.C. of the Premier League and Arsenal W.F.C. of the WSL.
Premier League club Arsenal is owned by American billionaire Stan Kroenke, through his Kroenke Sports and Entertainment company. Because the NFL prohibits club owners from owning teams in other markets, the Nuggets and Avalanche franchises are held in the name of his wife, Ann Walton Kroenke.
James “Bud” Walton, a co-founder of Walmart, is the father of Ann. By 2022, Forbes pegged Kroenke’s net worth at US$10.7 billion. Stan Kroenke is seventh on our list of the top 10 richest football club owners in the world.
Sports team holding firm founded by Kroenke has drawn criticism. He moved the St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles in 2016 and renamed the group the Los Angeles Rams.
Kroenke was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to establish a closed European Super League in 2021 that would have featured Arsenal and several other teams, therefore ending the conventional European football structure.
Under the partial or full ownership of Kroenke, his clubs have won four titles in the four main American sports; the Rams and Avalanche have each won two Super Bowls. Additionally, he owns two National Lacrosse League championships with the Mammoth and one MLS Cup with the Rapids.
8. Nasser Al-Khelaifi
Top 10 Richest Football Club Owners In The World-Nasser-Al-Khelaifi
Nasser bin Ghanim Al-Khelaifi is a businessman from Qatar who serves as the president of Paris Saint-Germain, the Qatar Tennis Federation, the chairman of beIN Media Group, the chairman of Qatar Sports Investments, and the vice president of the Asian Tennis Federation for West Asia.
Nasser Al-Khelaifi, a businessman from Qatar, is in charge of Qatar Sports Investments, the company that owns and manages Paris Saint-Germain.
Al-Khelaifi is the brains behind the world-record €222 million (£198m/$263m) sale of Neymar from Barcelona to PSG and the chairman of the beIN Media organization, which broadcasts a range of sports.
After Sultan Khalfan, Al-Khelaifi was the second-most successful tennis player on the Qatar Davis Cup team. He competed 43 times between 1992 and 2002, going 12-31 in singles matches and 12-16 in doubles matches.
Al-Khelaifi is eighth on our list of the top 10 richest football club owners in the world. He competed twice on the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) main tour, falling to Thomas Muster, a former French Open champion, in the first round of each of his matches at St. Pölten in 1996 and Doha in 2002.
In late 2002, he attained a singles ranking of No. 995, which was a career-high. The GCC Team Tournament was also won by him.
The President and CEO of the French soccer team Paris Saint-Germain is Al-Khelaifi. Additionally, he is on the FIFA Club World Cup organizing committee and was chosen to lead the European Club Association (ECA).
9. Zhang Jindong
Top 10 Richest Football Club Owners In The World–Zhang-jin dong.
One of the richest football club owners in the world Zhang Jindong is a Chinese billionaire entrepreneur. He is one of the founders and the current honorary chairman of Suning.com, headquartered in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province.
Additionally, he was the second-largest stakeholder and held 100% of Suning Holdings Group, 65% of Suning Real Estate, and 48.1% of Suning Appliance Group. The majority of the shares in the Italian football club Inter Milan are also owned by his company.
He was also the chairman of Suning.com and the managing director and general manager of Suning Holdings Group. Zhang Jindong is a Chinese billionaire who, through his company the Suning Holdings Group, acquired a majority ownership stake in Serie A club Inter in 2016.
The Suning group is a retail business dealing in domestic appliances, but Jindong’s other interests extend to the media and broadcasting sector, as well as sports.
One of his privately held businesses, Suning Real Estate, is one that his son Zhang Kangyang (Steven) owns a 10% ownership. In 2016, Suning Holdings Group bought the majority of the football team Inter Milan.
Following the takeover, his son Steven joined Inter’s board of directors and, as of 2018, has served as its chairman. Jindong is not a part of the board of directors.
10. Todd Boehly
Top 10 Richest Football Club Owners In The World-toddy boehly
Todd Boehly is the owner of the Chelsea Football Club. With an estimated net worth of $5 billion, he is one of the richest football club owners in the world.
He is an American businessman and investor. Eldridge Industries, a holding corporation with its headquarters in Greenwich, Connecticut, is a company he co-founded and for which he serves as chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling member.
Todd Boehly serves as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s interim CEO in addition to being a co-owner and chairman of Premier League football team Chelsea.
Early in his career, Boehly worked for J.H. Whitney & Company and Credit Suisse First Boston. He started the company’s credit investment division in 2001, took over the asset management division, and served as president after joining Guggenheim Partners.
Boehly oversaw an agreement in early 2013 between Time Warner Cable and the Major League Baseball team Los Angeles Dodgers to establish SportsNet LA, a local network to air Dodgers-related content and all Dodgers games. With the 2014 baseball season, the team-owned network started airing programming. Todd Boehly is tenth on our list of the richest football club owners in the world.
Top 10 Richest Football Club Owners In The World
The table below contains the names and net worths of the richest football club owners in the world in 2023
| RANK | NAME | NET WORTH | CLUB |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Public Investment Fund | $620 BILLION | Newcastle |
| 2. | Sheikh Mansour | $30 BILLION | Manchester City |
| 3. | Dietrich Mateschitz | $19.4 BILLION | Red Bull Salzburg |
| 4. | Andrea Agnelli (and family) | $13.5 BILLION | Juventus |
| 5. | Dietmar Hopp | $13 BILLION | Hoffenheim |
| 6. | Philip Anschutz | $10 BILLION | LA Galaxy |
| 7. | Stan Kroenke | $8.7 BILLION | Arsenal, Colorado Rapids |
| 8. | Nasser Al-Khelaifi | $8 BILLION | Paris Saint-Germain |
| 9. | Zhang Jindong | $7.6 BILLION | INTER |
| 10. | Todd Boehly | $5 BILLION | Chelsea |
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FAQs About The Top 10 Richest Football Club Owners In The World
Who Is The Richest Club Owner In The World?
The Public Investment Fund is the richest football club owner in the world with a whopping $620 billion in assets. Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia is in charge of this organization.
The owners have guaranteed the Premier League that the Saudi state will not be involved in the management of the club, which would be against Premier League ownership rules, despite the crown prince leading the Public Investment Fund.
In October 2021, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund reportedly completed a buyout that had been delayed by investing 80 per cent of Newcastle. Asides from this, the Fund has significant investments in businesses in places including Brazil, the US, Russia, India, and France.
Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Public Investment Fund, has been named the club’s chairman. He co-owns Newcastle with RB Sports & Media and PCP Capital Partners, who each invested 10% in the organization.
Additionally, the Public Investment Fund has made investments in numerous other businesses and projects throughout the world, particularly in the energy industry.
Many football fans have criticized the Saudi Arabian ownership of Newcastle, alleging that they are using the team as a means of sports washing to obscure their nation’s appalling record on human rights.
How Do Football Clubs Make Money?
Football clubs make money in various ways; however, a football team’s revenue stream can be broken down into three categories: ticket sales, television broadcasts, and marketing.
- Ticketing: Sale of match and season tickets.
- Broadcasting: For the games that are played in stadiums, broadcasts are produced and sold by media companies. The clubs get a portion of the broadcasting revenue due to their participation in domestic and international competitions.
- Marketing: Income that the clubs receive from their sponsors, merchandising, also other commercial activities such as tours and friendly matches.
The three main sources of revenue for a major club, like Liverpool, are marketing (38%), broadcasting (42%), and ticket sales (20%). Rarely do smaller clubs profit from marketing. For instance, 79% of Southampton FC’s revenue comes from broadcasting, 12% from ticket sales, and only 9% from marketing.
Up until the 1990s, the only source of money for football was ticket sales. The English Premier League was established in 1992, and SKY purchased the broadcasting rights. This has permanently altered the football industry.
Content Sources: Wikipedia, Goal.com, Sport Brief