US billionaires still love the Premier League

By Matthew Brooker

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a US businessman in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an English football team. Houston-based billionaire Dan Friedkin is the latest to join the club of Premier League owners, edging out fellow American John Textor to agree to a takeover of Everton FC. Wish him luck: He’s going to need it.

Friedkin enters a crowded field, with half of the Premier League’s 20 clubs already having US owners, including Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea. The enduring enthusiasm of US investors for English soccer is quite a phenomenon, considering the sport’s lowly status back home ranking well behind American football, baseball and basketball in popularity.

The Premier League is the world's most-watched domestic soccer competition, and revenue and valuations have surged over the past two decades as overseas investment poured in from the US, Middle East, China and elsewhere. That's all fine — unless you like profits too: Clubs in the top tier have posted aggregate pretax losses for the past five years totaling more than £3 billion ($4 billion) combined.

For Everton, Friedkin’s arrival is all candy. The club, based in the northwest port city of Liverpool, has a large fan base and a celebrated past, but hasn't won a trophy since 1995. Its fortunes have declined under the ownership of British-Iranian businessman Farhad Moshiri, who first invested in 2016, and the club sits joint bottom of the 20-team league five games into the new season. The deal ends a years-long search for a buyer that left Everton at risk of needing to seek protection from creditors. A proposed takeover by 777 Partners LLC collapsed earlier this year after the Miami-based investment company called in restructuring specialists amid legal battles with creditors.

.A moment for some chess-t thumping. Friedkin is a much more solid prospect than 777, whose chances of completing the Everton acquisition always looked tenuous. He has a net worth of $11.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg rich list, derived from a family company that’s been in business for more than five decades. The closely held Friedkin Group had $13.3 billion of revenue last year, according to the Houston Chronicle, with most of that coming from Gulf States Toyota, which distributes the Japanese company’s vehicles to dealerships in five US states.

The businessman’s accomplishments suggest a taste for challenge and adventure. They include co-founding a film and TV studio, and being a stunt pilot (like his father, Tom, who started the Toyota distribution business). He even has a record of success in football, having bought Italy’s AS Roma in 2020 and overseen its progression two years later to a first European trophy since the start of the 1960s. This is a man who landed a Spitfire on a beach in the Christopher Nolan movie Dunkirk. How hard could it be to get Everton off the ground again?

For the wider football industry, which contributes more than £8 billion a year to the UK economy, the Everton deal stands as testament to the fact that the Premier League still holds appeal for some US investors. That wasn’t to be taken for granted — especially given the example of another US-owned team that, like Everton, also plays in blue: Chelsea. Businessman Todd Boehly and California-based private equity firm Clearlake Capital agreed to pay £2.5 billion to acquire the London club from sanctioned Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich in 2022. They’ve struggled to achieve success since then, despite spending more than £1 billion on players (sometimes paying sky-high prices for unproven recruits that have subsequently failed to live up to their billing).

The influx of private equity money into English football was partly a bet that the game’s unsustainable cost structure would improve with regulatory restraints, while revenue would keep rising as technology offered more ways to monetise the global fan base. With Chelsea spending like it’s still the gold-rush years — even as the cheap-money era ended and media-rights values started to plateau — a more financially viable future still looks some way off. A spending arms race has turned some prospective investors off.

Boehly has said there's “nothing irrational” about Chelsea's approach, and that the club is laying a long-term foundation. But news that the Chelsea partners are assessing whether they can buy each other out amid a deterioration in the relationship between Boehly and Clearlake co-founder Behdad Eghbali, as Bloomberg News’s David Hellier and Giles Turner reported this month, has been taken as vindication by those who regard the club’s strategy as chaotic and unfocused.

This is the environment that Friedkin will be entering. Everton is admittedly a very different proposition to Chelsea: an underachiever rather than an elite club, with a new stadium that’s close to completion and a lot of upside potential. It will still need careful steering: Clubs are community assets, and fans can swiftly turn against owners perceived to be out of touch with the local culture, as Friedkin is finding out already with Roma. At least Everton will know it has an experienced pilot at the controls.

US billionaires still love the Premier League

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