Liverpool at £5.5bn, Chelsea’s £5bn figure and record Leicester sale – how football clubs are valued

From Liverpool’s reported £5.5billion valuation to Leicester City’s supposed £200m asking price, the summer’s M&A activity in English football has raised a key question – how do you actually value a football club?

With stakes and often entire teams being made for sale, it’s important to know quite how the numbers are crunched.

How do you put a price on a football club?
The last four weeks have seen a flurry of dealmaking in English football. Liverpool announced the sale of a minority stake to a consortium featuring Jeff Bezos, at what emerged this week at a £5.5billion valuation. Chelsea owners Mark Walter and Todd Boehly are said to be weighing a sale of their own stakes at a £5billion valuation. And the King Power Group is seeking more than £200m for control of League One Leicester City and its assets.

Three deals, three very different clubs and three varying valuations. This recent activity raises the question that the football industry has often struggled to answer: how do you actually put a price on a football club?

The revenue multiplier
Most normal businesses are valued by looking at the profit they currently make, and what they are expected to make in the future. English football clubs, however, are not normal businesses. The vast majority of clubs lose money. They can’t therefore be valued on a profit basis as, for the most part, they don’t make a profit.

The consensus within the football industry is therefore to value football clubs on a ‘revenue multiple’ basis. This means taking the amount of revenue (i.e. the money it makes before it spends anything) that the club has historically made and multiplying it by a ‘multiplier’, which reflects the specific value of the club.

Bigger clubs with larger brands will typically command a bigger multiple than smaller, more local clubs. For the Big Six Premier League clubs, the typical valuation formula in recent years has been to multiply revenues by about 6 times. When Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s INEOS purchased a minority stake in Manchester United in 2024, they did so at a reported £4.5billion valuation – approximately 6.9x their revenues of £648m. Other, non-top six, Premier League teams often trade at about a 2x revenue multiple.

Liverpool and Chelsea’s £5billion-plus valuations however suggest that the revenue multiples applied to top six clubs may be rising. Liverpool reported £700m of revenue in their last financial results. If, as numerous outlets have reported, the Bezos consortium invested at a £5.5billion valuation then that would represent almost an 8x revenue multiple. The slightly lower £5billion Chelsea valuation would similarly represent a 7x multiple on their projected revenue for 2025/26. Although the general consensus is that a £5billion valuation for Chelsea is unrealistic, the trend of elite clubs becoming more valuable is undeniable.

The Leicester outlier
Further down the pyramid, most League One teams trade at a revenue multiple of anywhere between 1x to 2x. With revenues rarely surpassing £20m, the largest transaction value for a League One team is typically no greater than £40m.

The King Power group in their sale of Leicester, however, are seeking to buck this trend. The Thai group is looking to reportedly recoup £200m in their sale of the East Midlands club. With Leicester’s revenue likely to fall to below £50m in League One, this would represent more than a 4x revenue multiple and, by some distance, the largest ever League One sale.

King Power appears to be relying on a different method in reaching their £200m valuation. The record League One valuation was reached not by looking at the club’s revenue, but rather its physical assets. The state of the art Seagrave training ground, opened in 2022, and the 32,000 capacity King Power Stadium together are themselves valued at over £200m. What King Power claims to be selling therefore is less a football club, and more a package of high-quality fixed assets.

Yet this ‘net asset value’ method is rarely used for football clubs, and for good reason. A stadium is not a warehouse. A 32,000-seat ground has almost no alternative use and no natural buyer other than another football club. Book value, in these circumstances, is close to a theoretical number.

The operating position compounds the issue. World-class facilities rarely generate meaningful revenue of their own. Worse, they often require substantial operating costs to maintain. For Leicester, whose revenue base will continue to shrink as parachute payments taper and Premier League broadcast income disappears, Seagrave and the King Power Stadium arguably sit closer to the liability side of the ledger than the asset side.

Any method has its limits
The Leicester valuation illustrates how varied the approach to valuing football clubs can be. But it also points to something more fundamental about the exercise as a whole.

With only 20 Premier League places, a buyer pool consisting increasingly of sovereign wealth or private institutional capital, and no comparable asset available anywhere else, price in football is set by scarcity and appetite far more than by methodology. The multiple, more often than not, is reverse-engineered afterwards to justify a number the parties had already reached.

Seen that way, King Power has not adopted a different valuation method so much as selected the one that produces the answer it wants. That is not unique to Leicester. It is simply more visible there, because a realistic revenue multiple – the method the industry prefers to cite – would produce a figure half the size.

Insight Eleven is a boutique M&A advisory firm specialising in football club transactions. You can follow them on LinkedIn here.