33 billion yuan, Serie A is about to launch another financing round.
According to Reuters, Italy's top football league Serie A is pushing forward a new round of capital operation. It plans to package overseas media rights, overseas gambling and sponsorship commercial assets to form an independently operated entity (abbreviation: Serie A Overseas), and sell a 10%-20% minority stake to global private equity institutions.
At present, four top PE institutions including Carlyle, Bain Capital, Oaktree Capital Management and Italian local private equity firm Nextalia have confirmed their entry into the bidding process.
Serie A intends to spin off three businesses of overseas broadcasting rights, overseas sponsorship and overseas gambling-related authorization from the main body of the league, put them into a new company, and then transfer a 10% to 20% minority stake to private equity funds. This business has an annual revenue of about 250 million euros and a core profit of about 200 million euros. The valuation range given by the participating bidding institutions is 3 billion to 4 billion euros, equivalent to 25 billion to 33 billion RMB. The caliber of local financial media in Milan is even higher, believing that the potential value of the entire transaction can reach 4.5 billion euros.
It is worth mentioning that this is already the third time that Serie A has put itself on the negotiating table of private equity funds. The previous two offers came and the money was prepared, but they were terminated due to internal disagreements.
The Most Beautiful League in the World
The earliest national football championship in Italy can be traced back to 1898, when the first champion was Genoa. The Serie A in the modern sense, that is, the nationally unified single top league, started in the 1929-1930 season. For more than half a century after that, its position in Europe fluctuated, and the real peak appeared in the 1980s and 1990s.
What kind of concept was that? AC Milan, Inter Milan, Juventus, Roma, Lazio, Parma and Sampdoria all had the ability to buy the world's most expensive players at the same time. The Dutch Three Musketeers, the German Troika, Diego Maradona and Roberto Baggio all played on this turf. Channel 4 in the UK began to broadcast Serie A from 1992, and a program called *Football Italia* made an entire generation of British children get to know the Apennine Peninsula before their domestic league. The title of "the most beautiful league in the world" was also obtained in those years.
The 2006 Calciopoli scandal relegated Juventus to the second division, damaging the credibility of the league; almost all stadiums belong to municipal authorities, so clubs cannot receive full match-day revenue and have no incentive to renovate stadiums; while the Premier League completed the global distribution of overseas copyrights in the same period. The Italian national team missed the 2018 and 2022 World Cups consecutively, and the global visibility of Italian football among audiences has been declining.
In 2010, the Serie A League was separated from the original institution that managed both the first and second divisions, and began to operate its commercial rights independently. The trouble also started from here: after independence, the 20 clubs each had their own accounts, and major matters required more than three-quarters of the votes to pass, so any structural reform had to go through the discussions of 20 parties.
The first attempt came in November 2020. The board of directors of Serie A unanimously approved a plan that a consortium composed of CVC Capital Partners, Advent International and the Italian Strategic Fund would invest 1.7 billion euros to buy a 10% stake in the newly established media company. Then league president Paolo Dal Pino called it a turning point for the Italian football industry. Three months later, seven clubs including Juventus, Inter Milan and Lazio jointly wrote to the league president, stating that the plan was no longer feasible. With the threshold of 14 votes, 7 clubs were enough to block the plan.
The public reason was that the feedback from the domestic broadcasting rights tender was better than expected, and the decline was not as large as imagined, so it was not cost-effective to sell equity at this time. The unwritten reason was that the CVC plan included high penalties for teams leaving the league, which made Juventus very uncomfortable - that was the eve of the European Super League controversy.
The second attempt followed soon. From the end of 2021 to 2022, Carlyle, Apax Partners and Three Hills Capital considered a joint proposal, and Searchlight Capital also expressed interest; Oaktree Capital put forward a non-binding plan, proposing to invest 1.75 billion euros through a combination of 1 billion euros in loans and 750 million euros to buy a 5% stake, implying an overall valuation of 15 billion euros for the media company. This round also ended without any results. The 20 clubs never managed to get a majority on the issue of "whether to let funds enter the league".
The design of this time is obviously narrowed. The domestic business remains unchanged, only the overseas part is separated; the sale ratio is changed from a fixed 10% to a flexible range of 10% to 20%; the assets included in the package are the part that is currently the least valuable and hardest to sell for Serie A.
The cost is that the money distributed to each club is also reduced. Based on a valuation of 3 billion to 4 billion euros, 10% to 20% corresponds to 300 million to 800 million euros, which is divided equally among 20 clubs, with about 150 million to 400 million RMB per club. For Juventus, this is roughly half the value of a mid-tier striker; for a newly promoted team, it may be the entire season's transfer budget.
In addition, 250 million euros in revenue brings 200 million euros in core profits, with a profit margin close to 80%. Anyone in the content industry will be stunned by this figure. However, this new company hardly bears any costs. Player salaries, stadium operations and youth training investments all remain on the respective books of the 20 clubs. It is only responsible for distributing the already produced 90-minute matches outside Italy.
The cost side is borne by others, and it only intercepts the cash flow of the distribution link. According to market estimates, the valuation of the new company is no less than 18 times the copyright revenue. The institutions that give this multiple are not buying football, but a clean toll channel with almost no capital expenditure.
Why Overseas, Why Now
According to Deloitte's data, among the five major European leagues in the 2024/25 season, the total revenue of all clubs reached 21.6 billion euros. The Premier League's revenue is 6.8 billion pounds, La Liga's revenue increased by 9% to 4.1 billion euros, the Bundesliga's revenue increased by 12% to break through the 4 billion mark for the first time, Serie A's revenue increased by 4% to 3 billion euros, and Ligue 1's revenue fell by 15% to 2.2 billion euros. Serie A ranks fourth, overtaken by the Bundesliga, and is only slightly better than Ligue 1 whose performance is collapsing.
If we extend the time horizon to ten years, the problem becomes more obvious. Over the past decade, Serie A's revenue has increased by about 60%, while in the same period the Premier League's revenue has increased by 130%, La Liga's by 100%, and the Bundesliga's by 80%. It is not that there is no growth, but that it has underperformed all its competitors.
The overseas business part is the most unsatisfactory. According to UEFA data, Serie A's annual international media revenue is about 250 million euros, which is not at the same level as the Premier League and La Liga. With clubs like Juventus, the two Milan teams, Roma and Napoli, its global influence should not be at such a low level.
The other side of the ledger is continuous losses. In the 2024/25 season, the 20 Serie A clubs added another 348.8 million euros in losses. Although this figure is 5.7% lower than last year, according to this trend, the total losses accumulated in the years after the pandemic will break through the 4 billion euro mark this season. The overall debt of Italian professional football clubs has reached 5.5 billion euros, and the revenue-to-debt coverage rate was 97% in the 2007/08 season, but has now dropped to 83%.
There are many spectators in the stands, but the losses on the financial statements have been continuing.
The domestic market is basically saturated. In October 2023, Serie A sold its domestic broadcasting rights from 2024 to 2029 to companies such as DAZN and Sky Sport Italia, generating at least 4.5 billion euros in revenue within five years, about 900 million euros per year, which is lower than the previous level of about 930 million euros per year. 17 clubs voted in favor. Aurelio De Laurentiis, chairman of Napoli, directly interrupted the press conference of the league's CEO Luigi De Siervo at the event, saying that these contracts would be the death of Italian football. For a mature local market whose overseas market has not yet been fully opened, the source of funds is obvious.
The problem is that the overseas market is also becoming increasingly narrow. After the Champions League expanded, the schedule became more intensive, and the budgets and attention of broadcasters were diverted by more matches, but fans still continue to flock to the Premier League. Serie A even failed in the bidding for the Middle East and North Africa market before, the original rights holder withdrew, and the negotiations with Saudi Arabia also failed to reach an agreement. As a result, international pay TV revenue decreased by about one-third to 640 million euros in the three-year period ending in 2024.
What Serie A wants to sell is actually the part of assets that it is most reluctant to sell.
There is also an easily overlooked detail in the asset package. Since 2018, Italy has very strict regulations on gambling advertising and sponsorship, and gambling brands on the chest of club jerseys are rarely seen. There is no space for this business in the local market, and the only way out is to go global. It is logically reasonable to sell overseas copyrights and overseas sponsorships bundled together, which also reflects the position of the new company - all its revenue comes from outside Italy.
What PE Firms Are Buying Is Not Just Football
Sports assets have been systematically re-priced over the past five years.
The Rothschild Actos Sports Franchise Index recorded an annualized return of 16% in the ten years up to the first quarter of 2026, and has very low correlation with stocks, bonds, private equity, private credit, real estate and infrastructure. For institutional investors looking for differentiated exposure for long-term portfolios, this portfolio is quite convincing.
The regulatory door also opened at the same time. Major League Baseball took the lead in allowing fund investment in 2019, followed by the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association. The National Football League, which has always been the most conservative, lifted the ban in August 2024, with a cap of 10% per team. In 2024, minority equity investment accounted for 48% of global sports transaction volume. In February 2026, KKR acquired sports investment firm Actos for 1.4 billion dollars, and the latter's position in institutional sports assets accounts for about half of the entire market.
Money is not testing the sports sector, it is building permanent infrastructure in sports. This Serie A deal is just a point on this curve. Before this point, European football already has two precedents.
La Liga took the earliest step. In the 2021 "La Liga Boost Plan", CVC Capital Partners invested 1.994 billion euros in exchange for an 8.2% stake in the new company, in exchange for the right to share broadcasting and sponsorship revenue for the next 50 years. Real Madrid, Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao opposed the plan all the way to the court, and the Madrid court rejected the temporary injunction application of the three clubs to suspend the transaction. Ligue 1 followed closely. In 2022, the French Professional Football League sold a 13% stake in its commercial company to CVC for 1.5 billion euros, and the new company had an initial valuation of 11.5 billion euros, with Paris Saint-Germain getting the largest share.
Then came the outcome.
The development of Ligue 1 is worth reviewing completely. The broadcasting contracts of Mediapro and DAZN failed one after another, the value of Ligue 1 media rights shrank significantly, and the league was forced to build its own consumer-oriented streaming service. The book value of CVC's equity stake was then written down. A report from the French Senate last October directly pointed out that the professional league had serious management failures, and even the CVC transaction itself was criticized for potentially harming the long-term prospects of the league. The French Football Federation even proposed to start a new setup and absorb the functions of the league into a new company, on the grounds that the existing governance structure is too complex.
The most illustrative evidence is the pricing given by the asset side itself. CVC's global sports group initially sold large equity stakes at a valuation of 9 billion euros during fundraising, but several potential buyers declined on the grounds that some assets performed poorly, including the French Professional Football League and the English Premiership Rugby; in the end, the fundraising was completed at a valuation of 7 billion euros, with a scale of 3.7 billion euros. The 2 billion euros gap between 9 billion and 7 billion is the market's new quotation for the event of "funds taking stakes in the league".
Such transactions are generally called financing, but they are not. The league did not borrow any money that needs to be repaid, but sold a small part of the overseas cash flow in the next few decades at a discount, in exchange for cash that can be immediately distributed to clubs to fill the current loss gap.
The accounts of the funds are also very clear. Giving a 18x P/E ratio is betting that Serie A's overseas revenue can grow from 250 million euros to 500 million euros - Serie A itself has also set a goal of doubling this revenue. However, in the past decade, this figure has almost stagnated, and even declined in some cycles. What is needed to achieve the doubling? No one can provide a public and verifiable path yet. The time scales of the two sides are not on the same scale: the fund has a limited duration, and needs to give an explanation to its investors within five to seven years; while the clubs are selling the work remuneration of future managers.
Finally, there is the governance threshold. 20 shareholders, a 14-vote threshold, plus a new shareholder that may also hold the defending champion. Oaktree Capital has been the actual controller of Inter Milan since May 2024, when Suning failed to repay the loan whose principal and interest had increased to about 395 million euros by the deadline, and the team changed ownership. A fund that controls the current league champion directly investing in the league's central international commercial company has made some Serie A clubs publicly point out that there is a conflict of interest.
The flow of the bidding list is also worth noting. Among the institutions that were informally contacted by JPMorgan in April this year, there were Apollo Global Management, CVC Capital Partners, Ares Management and Sixth Street Partners. By early September, CVC and Ares were reported to have withdrawn, Carlyle chose to bid together with Nextalia, and the Italian Strategic Fund also appeared in the list of potential bidders. The institutions that came and went sometimes explain the situation better than those that stayed.
The offers have been on JPMorgan's desk for a week. What happens next will not take place in the conference rooms in Milan, but in the respective calculations of the 20 clubs.
The 14 votes were not gathered five years ago. This time the asset package is smaller, and the controversy is theoretically reduced, but the money distributed to each party is also less.
As for whether the overseas business marked at 33 billion RMB is worth the price, the answer is not on the offer sheet, but whether Serie A can truly sell its matches outside Italy in the next ten years.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Rongzhong Finance" (ID: thecapital), written by Wang Tao, edited by Wu Ren, and published with authorization from 36Kr.