Sports Clubs Going Public

Last updated on 25 February 2025·Consumer, Sports

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Sports IPOs overview

We continue our deep dive into sports valuations, and analyze IPO performance of clubs that went public. Markets don't seem to like European football though (or rather its challenging business model), and football (soccer) stocks perform very poorly.

There are quite a few listed European clubs, including top names like Manchester United, Borussia Dortmund or Juventus yet none of them provides satisfying returns to investors (and most lost significant value since the IPO, some as much as 90%).

It's a stark contrast to American clubs that are more durable, 'predictable' franchises. Very few teams go public in the US (different ownership rules), but those that are listed (Atlanta Braves) perform much better than their European counterparts.

Public markets aren’t big fans of (European) sports

European clubs often seek liquidity through IPO but their performance is relatively flat over the years. Few public comps in the US, but the most prominent ones (Atlanta Braves and MSGS) trade well above European clubs.

All European sports IPOs performed very poorly

All European sports IPO perfomed very poorly and it's tough to make money with European football. Extremely disappointing performance from virtually all European soccer IPOs once again highlights a huge difference vs. the US in how sports markets are managed.

Manchester United is the only (!) profitable European sports team that is publicly traded

Manchester United is the only consistently profitable publicly-listed European sports team.

Very few publicly traded billion-dollar teams

Huge long tail of smaller (usually European) football clubs that went public yet didn't grow into their valuations

Data and methodology

Underlying data

Public markets data is powered by FactSet (consensus analyst estimates), and Morningstar (historical data). Data points are calendarized to December where relevant: retrieved data on financial year ends (e.g. FY, FY+1 etc.) are mapped to calendar years (2025A, 2026E etc.) before the appropriate month weights are then applied to prior/future fundamentals.

Private transaction data is multi-sourced, aggregated from harvesting public information, 3rd party APIs, and data engineering. All data is verified and provided with an extensive manual process. If data permits, we apply our own logic to get to the EV. For example, for a large M&A deal with available information on the target's net debt, we might adjust a valuation to fully reflect an accurate EV. In all other cases, we take the reported valuation as the numerator. Financials: we source LTM revenue and LTM EBITDA data from company filings, press releases, or other verified sources. If LTM data is unavailable, we take the 'next best-fit' period (run-rate or calendar year), provided it makes sense in a given case. For example, if a deal closed in November 2025, we might take full-year 2025 revenue as a revenue benchmark.

Any raw figures are harmonised to USD for comparison purposes.

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