The complicated Americanization of European soccer

When “Welcome to Wrexham” premiered in 2022, the premise was a novel one: two North American actors — Rob McElhenney of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and Hollywood A-lister Ryan Reynolds — with just a superficial understanding of soccer take ownership of Wales’ historic Wrexham Association Football Club, hoping to lift the team out of the English football league’s bottom tier. Now in its third season, the docuseries is a bona fide hit as audiences follow the stars’ crash course in European football and cheer on a team many had never heard of before the show aired.

But for all of the show’s made-for-TV charm, the fundamental story it tells is not wholly limited to the sleepy Welsh town for which it is named. While McElhenney and Reynolds may have the spotlight of Hollywood illuminating their foray into foreign football, European soccer leagues — particularly in the U.K. — have become hotbeds for American investments. The impact of the trend is being felt not only in the corporate boardrooms of teams across Europe but in the stadiums as well. There, the continent’s long and storied soccer culture is coming face to face with an infusion of uniquely American energy.

“More than a third of the 92 professional teams in England’s top four leagues now have some form of U.S. ownership,” Bloomberg said. When teams come up for sale, “the likely buyers are mostly American.” In part, the match is an opportunistic convenience, with U.S. sports leading the world “in terms of commercialization and monetization of various assets” but without “the international reach of football,” American-owned Burnley Football Club advisor Sasha Ryazantsev explained.

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European soccer’s “promotion” system — wherein lower ranked teams can move up into more elite leagues — offers another draw for Americans like Jordan Gardner, whose 2019 purchase of a Danish team ended up a rewarding investment opportunity, Marketplace said. “You can buy the equivalent of a AAA baseball team and get it to the equivalent of the major leagues,” Gardner said. If “done properly,” it can be “financially lucrative.”

The trend, particularly in regard to private equity firms, has been fueled most recently by the COVID effect, The Associated Press said. Many clubs were “distressed after COVID,” 777 Partners Operating Partner Jonathan Lutzky said. The pandemic-fueled downturn allowed the Miami-based firm, which has stakes in clubs across Europe, to “get in at a good price point,” Lutzky said. His story is not unique, either. COVID restrictions “kept fans out of the stands and costs rose,” which in turn created “an opening for more U.S. investors to take a stake in the increasingly popular global sport,” CNBC said. Often, this caused American investors to “snap up multiple teams and move toward a so-called ‘multi-club’ model.” The process is “similar to the minor leagues in the U.S.,” in which “players can be transferred throughout the various clubs owned by the same investor, building up their talent and potentially being sold to a higher league.”

With nine of the U.K.’s 20 Premier League teams owned by Americans, “most of the Americans spotted in the owners’ box from time to time — or, worse, seldom spotted there at all — are disdained by their club’s fans,” The New York Times said. The influx of American money and influence on U.K. soccer has “reached a point where there is something of a stigma against American ownership,” former Manchester City player Nedum Onuoha told the paper.

There have already been a number of incidents in which European fans have turned against American club investors, including one instance where a “group of unhappy supporters of Belgian team K.V. Oostende trapped American owner Paul Conway in a stadium bathroom” to protest their club’s recent downturn, Front Office Sports said. Chelsea club owner Todd Boehly, meanwhile, is a “private equity king in the U.S. who is looking an utter amateur in English football,” The Times UK said. Which is not to say that the deck is universally stacked against American forays into soccer. American Liverpool Club owner John W. Henry’s initial years with the team were a series of disasters, after which “he apologized and communicated with fans” and is “now considered one of the best owners around.”