I bought a football club.

Well, to be more accurate, I bought a piece of a football club. Actually, I bought pieces of two.

No, I’m not a billionaire. I’m a regular Joe.

So why would anyone who isn’t  billionaire do such a thing?

Because billionaires know what’s next.

There’s something almost stereotypical about football club ownership these days. Billionaires and vanity millionaires descend on European clubs, spend absurd amounts of money, sit in the directors’ box and occasionally discover that owning a football team is considerably more complicated than Football Manager suggested.

But even as they blow through budgets, face relegation, and get yelled at by fans, the billionaires always seem to profit in the end.

There’s a reason increasingly large piles of money are chasing sports assets, and I don’t think it’s simply because rich people want expensive toys.

They’re buying tribal enthusiasm.

And there isn’t much of that left.

Think about watching Netflix with your kids. Before you can watch anything, you have to negotiate. What show does everyone want to watch? What movie can everyone tolerate? Halfway through, somebody is probably looking at their phone anyway.

When I was a kid, we had four television channels. Everybody knew what was on. The next morning at school, people talked about the same shows because we had all watched the same things.

Those cultural touchpoints have largely disappeared.

Our attention has splintered across Netflix, YouTube, cable, TikTok, Instagram, gaming and a thousand other things. My media diet probably looks nothing like yours, and yours probably looks nothing like your neighbour’s.

Sport is different.

Sport remains one of the few places where enormous groups of people voluntarily agree to pay attention to exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.

When I sit down to watch football with my kids, I know what we’re watching. I also know there’s a pretty good chance they’re actually going to watch it rather than disappear into their phones.

That is increasingly rare.

And incredibly valuable.

The ultimate content factory

Consider the economics of a movie.

Netflix can spend tens of millions of dollars developing and producing something over several years. You watch it for 90 minutes, decide whether you liked it and then immediately ask, “What else have you got?”

Football produces another 90-minute episode next week.

Except nobody knows the ending.

The stories develop live. Players emerge. Managers get fired. Heroes become villains. A relegation battle appears. A promotion chase develops. There are injuries, controversies, terrible refereeing decisions, spectacular goals and miserable Tuesday nights when absolutely nothing goes right.

Then everybody comes back for the next episode.

Better still, people will pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for the privilege of sitting inside the studio while the content is being created, and enthusiastically provide the soundtrack themselves.

From a commercial perspective, that’s extraordinary.

Try covering a movie in advertising and people will stop watching it.

Sport is absolutely covered in advertising.

It’s on the field. It’s on the scoreboard. It’s on the stadium. It’s on the shirts. It’s in the pregame show and the halftime show. It’s on the broadcast graphics. It’s on social media. It’s in the hospitality suite.

Sponsors don’t merely interrupt the content. They become part of it.

That’s why money keeps chasing sport.

And there’s another factor: scarcity.

You can create another streaming service. You can launch another production company. You can make another television series.

You cannot create another Manchester United.

Even considerably further down the football pyramid, clubs have histories, identities and relationships with their communities that cannot simply be manufactured by somebody with enough venture capital.

Sports ownership is a gated community. There are only so many clubs available, and every time somebody with more money decides they want one, the value of admission goes up.

Which brings me back to my football clubs.

From Altrincham to Glenavon

My first experience came with Altrincham FC in England, where I became an investor and served as a director for several years.

Altrincham plays in the fifth tier of English football, the same level Wrexham occupied when Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney arrived.

I paid considerably less for my piece than they did for theirs.

They have, admittedly, enjoyed a somewhat larger return.

But the Altrincham experience taught me something much more valuable than how to sit in a directors’ box looking concerned.

It taught me how football clubs actually work.

That became important when a group of us began looking for another opportunity.

We formed Football International Limited, a group of six people with complementary skill sets across areas including finance, legal, marketing, analytics, scouting and hospitality.

And then we looked.

And looked.

We spent several years examining clubs because the objective wasn’t to be able to walk around telling people, “I own a football club.”

The objective was to own the right football club.

Eventually we found Glenavon FC in Northern Ireland.

The bones were exactly what we were looking for.

Buying something you can’t manufacture

Glenavon came with 135 years of history, a substantial stadium, land, a deeply committed supporter base and participation in a national football system that provides a pathway into European competition.

It also came with problems.

The club was heading toward relegation and wasn’t in wonderful financial shape. There was work to do on the field, commercially and operationally.

But you can fix operations.

You can improve marketing. You can upgrade facilities. You can find sponsors. You can develop players. You can build better systems.

What you can’t manufacture is 135 years of history.

You can’t manufacture generations of supporters who care whether you win on Saturday.

That matters.

The beauty of European football is that the gated community has a side entrance.

North American professional sports generally require enormous amounts of capital just to get through the door. Franchises are deliberately scarce, leagues are closed and expansion slots can cost staggering amounts of money.

European football has promotion and relegation.

Operate effectively, build intelligently, win football matches and your club can move through the divisions.

Go further down the pyramid, or look at smaller footballing countries, and suddenly sports ownership isn’t necessarily the exclusive preserve of billionaires.

There are clubs with good facilities, loyal supporters, long histories and genuine potential that are actively looking for investors and owner-operators.

That doesn’t make buying one easy.

It makes buying one possible.

Don’t buy the dream. Buy the right club.

For someone who loves sport, has some capital, possesses skills applicable to running an organization and perhaps has several associates who bring complementary abilities, football ownership can be considerably more accessible than most people imagine.

But there’s a giant caveat.

Don’t just buy something because you want to say you own a football club.

That’s how people lose a lot of money very quickly.

You need the right club, the right partners, the right community and the right price. You need to understand the league, the finances, the facilities, the supporters, the liabilities and exactly what you’re getting yourself into.

Our experience at Altrincham directly informed the decisions we made with Glenavon.

We knew more the second time around.

And one of the biggest things we knew was that buying a football club doesn’t mean you get to buy players and send them out onto the field.

The football is almost the easy part.

A football club is a hundred little businesses

A football club is really a collection of small businesses and operational headaches wrapped around a team.

There’s a stadium to operate and maintain. There are volunteers to recruit, organize and keep happy. There’s merchandising to source, price and sell properly. There’s hospitality, ticketing, sponsorship, food and beverage, security, maintenance, marketing, social media, community engagement and a hundred other things nobody thinks about while watching a match.

Almost every decision comes with politics attached.

Some of those politics are external. Councils, governing bodies, sponsors, local businesses and the wider community all have their own interests.

Some are internal, and potentially even more complicated.

Pick the wrong colour for a shirt and supporters can be outraged. Charge too much for a pie and people stop buying them. Move somebody’s seat, change a tradition or redesign a badge without understanding what it means to the people who have been coming through the gates for 40 years and you can create a crisis completely disproportionate to the amount of money involved.

That’s because you’re not operating a normal business.

You’re temporarily responsible for something people believe belongs, at least partly, to them.

And they’re right.

But get that relationship right and the economics of lower-league football can become surprisingly interesting.

If you can get the day-to-day operation working properly, or employ good people who can, there are dozens of places where relatively small improvements can add up.

Better sponsorship. Better hospitality. More effective merchandising. More people through the gates. More revenue per supporter. Better use of the stadium on non-matchdays. Stronger community relationships. Better development and eventual sale of players.

None of those things individually turns a lower-league football club into Manchester United.

Collectively, however, they can turn a poorly operated club into a sustainable and potentially profitable one.

The trick is not allowing football’s greatest temptation to destroy all that work.

You can spend six months finding another £100,000 of annual revenue and approximately six minutes giving it to a player.

That’s where discipline matters.

If your business model requires continually writing six-figure cheques for players in the hope that promotion will eventually bail you out, you haven’t really built a business.

You’ve built a very expensive bet.

Our approach is the opposite. Make the operation underneath the football stronger, so success on the field becomes an accelerant rather than a requirement for survival.

The upside may happen on the pitch, but much of the value is created everywhere else.

So what are we doing with Glenavon?

Today, Glenavon is working its way toward where we believe it belongs, back in Northern Ireland’s Premiership.

Off the field, we’re streamlining operations, improving facilities, building commercial opportunities and trying to provide the sort of stable leadership that allows the football side to succeed.

We’re not interested in throwing millions at some striker because he once had a cup of coffee with Everton.

The philosophy is much less glamorous than that.

Build from the bottom up. Invest in grassroots. Improve the infrastructure. Develop sustainable revenue. Make the matchday experience better. Give supporters reasons to become more involved.

And make sure the organization underneath the first team is strong enough to support whatever happens on the pitch.

If we do those things properly, there are several possible endings to the story.

Glenavon can return to the Premiership, compete toward the top end of Northern Irish football and potentially find its way back into European competition. If that happens, the value of what we’ve invested in should increase substantially.

Or perhaps one day somebody with considerably deeper pockets will decide they want what we’ve built and offer us more than we paid for it.

I’d prefer the first option.

But you never know.

Because right now, people with more money than you or me are circling sporting assets all over the world.

They’re buying clubs. They’re buying leagues. They’re buying broadcasting rights. They’re buying tournaments and pieces of virtually everything surrounding them.

They’ve figured out something important.

They aren’t simply buying football.

They’re buying attention. They’re buying history. They’re buying scarcity.

Most importantly, they’re buying something increasingly difficult to find anywhere else in modern culture:

A tribe that already cares.

And, as it turns out, you don’t necessarily need to be a billionaire to buy a piece of one.