How much does it cost to buy a football club (lower leagues)? Achievable?

[shamans]

As a kid it was always my dream to buy a football club, manage it and watch it grow! (maybe not do the manage part if I truly want it to grow )

Now I'm thinking semi/professional or 5th tier clubs in England or say Spain. Would it be possible to say get a bunch of friends together and buy a club for 500k kind of like a house mortgage?

And also.. if the club does get a league promotion would it be profitable?

 

[Tommy]

You could buy Palermo for €10 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/f...att-involved-company-bought-Palermo-8-92.html

 

[jojojo]

As a kid it was always my dream to buy a football club, manage it and watch it grow! (maybe not do the manage part if I truly want it to grow )

Now I'm thinking semi/professional or 5th tier clubs in England or say Spain. Would it be possible to say get a bunch of friends together and buy a club for 500k kind of like a house mortgage?

And also.. if the club does get a league promotion would it be profitable?

They're often given away if they're carrying debt or are making a loss (most are) and have no saleable assets (land, stadium, clubhouse etc).

Keeping them afloat is hard. Annual playing budgets in the English 5th tier start around 500k and go up over 1m for the teams that are serious about promotion. That's ignoring any infrastructure investment for stadium improvements etc.

Some clubs rely a lot on fan goodwill, with volunteers doing a lot of the work and most of the fundraising. Gate receipts alone don't make them viable.

In Spain for semi-pro teams you'd be looking at the regional leagues, the 2Bs and the 3s. Budgets start lower but so do earnings and even after a promotion to Liga2 very good financial management is required to break even.

 

[Chipper]

This looks like the way to go:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/36266364

Pete Hackleton, tax partner at Saffery Champness, explains: "What can be quite popular is if you have a profitable company which is already paying tax in the UK or anywhere else on its profits and you were to buy a football club which is making losses, then the profitable company can sponsor the football club.

"You could be the main shirt sponsor, stand sponsor or whatever else. Let's say the profitable company pays £1m a year for that privilege. The profitable company has an extra £1m for expenditure, so effectively it saves tax on that £1m, and the football club has an extra £1m of income, which, because it has other losses, probably doesn't have to pay tax.

"But the other way for the owners is quite often if they've got a profitable company, they will acquire the football club underneath that company. Then what you can do is, when the football club makes a loss, you can surrender those losses to the profitable company.

"If that company is making £5m a year of profit, it would have £1m of tax to pay in the UK. But if the company is making a £5m profit and a football club underneath it making a £5m loss, you can just offset the two. Overall there's no profit and no tax to pay."

Edit: Remember MyFootballClub, when people pitched in a few quid each to buy a football team? Apparenlty they paid £635k for Ebbsfleet United.

 

[padr81]

You could probably buy an Fai club over here for a bag of tayto crisps and a couple of pints. You also couldn't do any worse at running them into the ground then previous owners did.

 

[Needham]

It costs nothing. Just borrow the money from the bank and get the club to pay it back.