Who are the wealthiest football club owners on the planet? Join @SteTudor123 as he looks at the richest owners in the sport...
1) Public Investment Fund (Newcastle United) - £346bn
No other owner in world football is in the same financial ballpark as Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund that is staggeringly over five times richer than the rest of this list put together.
With that in mind, it’s perhaps a blessing that Financial Fair Play exists, limiting Newcastle’s buying power.
Otherwise the Magpies could conceivably sign any player, from any club, weakening rivals and thereby making the Premier League uncompetitive.
The Toon Army celebrated wildly when the takeover was confirmed. There are three hundred and fifty billion reasons why.
2) Sheikh Mansour (Manchester City) - £16.5bn
City’s Premier League odds are unsurprisingly short this term having won the title four times in the last five years, and such dominance always seemed likely when Sheikh Mansour's Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) purchased a sleeping giant for £200m back in 2008.
An estimated spend of £1.5bn since has brought the club a wealth of trophies along with a substantial rise in status off the pitch.
Indeed, their revenues have quadrupled in that period.
3) Andrea Agnelli (Juventus) - £11.1bn
The passing of Red Bull cofounder Dietrich Mateschitz last October moves the all-powerful Agnelli family into third, as well as taking Salzburg, Leipzig and the like off this list as technically they’re now owned by different factions of the Red Bull empire.
The industrialist Agnelli clan – makers of Ferrari, Fiat and Alfa Romeo – are involved in numerous businesses and it’s Andrea who runs their footballing enterprise, in the form of ensuring the Old Lady competes at the summit of Serie A.
4) Dietmar Hopp (Hoffenheim) - £10.7bn
Having made his fortune in software and data processing, Hopp has personally invested an estimated third of a billion pounds into the German outfit, who languished in the third-tier when he took the reins.
Hoffenheim may be unable to dislodge Bayern Munich from its well-established perch but they are unquestionably one of the richest clubs in world soccer.
5) Philip Anschutz (LA Galaxy) - £8.2bn
With the sad passing of Mateschitz, and Roman Abramovich selling on Chelsea, Anschutz finds himself the fifth wealthiest owner of a club so perhaps it’s odd that so little is known about a businessman whose first venture was selling Kool-Aid to students at a nearby campus.
An appraisal of his business interests explains why he is so difficult to pin down because there isn’t much the 83-year-old is not involved in. Energy, sport, entertainment, railroads, real estate, newspapers.
Anschutz is a major player in each.
6) Stan Kroenke (Arsenal, Colorado Rapids) - £7.2bn
Having ridden out a takeover bid last year, the American billionaire remains firmly at the helm in North London, a fact that doesn’t sit well with Gooners, who are critical of a perceived under-investment in their club.
Can you really blame them when you tot up all the noughts on his personal worth?
7) Nasser Al-Khelaifi (PSG) - £6.6bn
In the Seventies, Paris Saint-Germain were an unremarkable club who seemed to permanently reside mid-table in Ligue 1.
A generation on, they are among the favourites each season in the football betting to lift the Champions League while up front they boast a striking trio of Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi.
So much of their rise is naturally down to the eyewatering sums ploughed into the club by Al-Khelaifi, head of Qatar Sports Investments.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to AP Photo*
FIRST PUBLISHED: 10th January 2023
