Football has sold almost everything.
The shirt.
The stadium.
The television rights.
Even tomorrow’s income.
Now finance has found something else.
The club itself.
On 17 September 2026, Amplify filed preliminary paperwork in America for a new investment fund called the Amplify Pro Sports Private & Public Ownership ETF.
PROS.
It has not launched.
The SEC has not approved it.
But the idea matters more than the ticker.
The fund is designed to give investors exposure to companies that own sports teams, leagues and venues. Up to 15% could also sit in private sports investments.
The objective is simple.
Make money from the rising value of sport.
Nothing wrong with that.
But we need to understand what is being sold.
Because buying exposure to football ownership is not the same as owning your football club.
And owning shares in your football club is not the same as having the power to protect it.
Those are three different things.
Exposure. Ownership. Stewardship.
Football keeps mixing them together.
It shouldn’t.
Put $1,000 into a sports fund and you have financial exposure.
Buy 5% of a club and you have equity.
Get enforceable rights over the stadium, name, badge and governance and you have stewardship.
One is an investment.
One is ownership.
One is protection.
You can have one without the others.
That matters.
Because if I own shares in a sports ETF, I might make money when football valuations rise.
Good.
But I cannot stop somebody selling Old Trafford.
I cannot stop them changing a badge.
I cannot appoint a supporter director.
I cannot protect the institution.
I own an investment.
I do not own the club.
That distinction is going to matter a lot more over the next ten years.
Who made these clubs valuable?
There is only one Manchester United.
One Liverpool.
One Wrexham.
You can create another sports company next Tuesday.
You cannot create another century of history by Tuesday afternoon.
That is why football clubs are valuable.
They are scarce.
But scarcity did not appear by accident.
Supporters built it.
Parents took children.
Local businesses sponsored clubs.
Fans travelled hundreds of miles in the rain.
Families passed clubs down like surnames.
History became culture.
Culture became loyalty.
Loyalty became audience.
Audience became money.
Then finance arrived, put a multiple on it and called it enterprise value.
Fair enough.
But there is a problem.
The people who created much of the value are usually the last people offered any equity in it.
That is backwards.
Stop asking fans what they think
Football loves fan engagement.
Surveys.
Forums.
Advisory boards.
Lovely.
Then somebody sells hundreds of millions of dollars of equity and the supporters own none of it.
So stop asking supporters how they feel.
Write them into the deal.
My starting point is simple.
When a major football club raises new equity or changes ownership, reserve 5–10% of the transaction for supporters at the same price offered to institutional investors.
Not free shares.
Not cheap shares.
Same price.
The first 5% could be underwritten for a fixed subscription period.
If supporters do not buy the whole allocation, the remainder goes straight back into the institutional book.
The deal still happens.
Nobody holds the sale hostage.
If demand is strong, let the fan allocation grow towards 10%.
That is not romance.
That is a capital structure.
Then give the shares teeth
Owning 5% alone does not protect anything.
If somebody else owns 70%, they still own 70%.
So the supporter equity needs rights.
A board director.
Pre-emption rights on future share issues.
Information rights.
Then protect the things that actually make the club the club.
The ground.
The name.
The badge.
The colours.
Put those protections into the constitutional and transaction documents.
Give them proper approval thresholds.
And name a supporter trust, or similar body, that can enforce them.
If the ground needs separate protection, protect the property too.
Because a clause that disappears after a new holding company, a sale or an insolvency process is not protection.
It is marketing.
The point is not consultation.
It is architecture.
What does 5% actually cost?
Take Manchester United.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s original deal involved buying roughly 25% of the club for about $1.25 billion, alongside a separate $300 million infrastructure commitment.
The simple maths gives you an implied equity value of about $5 billion.
There is an asterisk.
Different share classes were involved.
New capital went in.
Control and governance rights were negotiated separately.
Which is useful.
Because it proves the point.
The shares had a price. The rights had a separate negotiation.
At that rough $5 billion valuation, a 5% supporter stake costs around:
$250 million.
That is a lot of money.
Good.
Real ownership costs real money.
But nobody is suggesting supporters stand outside Old Trafford with a bucket.
A regulated supporter vehicle could bring together ordinary fans, wealthy supporters, local investors and aligned long-term capital.
The important bit is not where every dollar comes from.
The important bit is that the allocation exists before the deal closes.
Fans are not outside afterwards asking the owner for a token gesture.
They are already in the term sheet.
Tottenham shows what happens next
Buying the shares is only the first problem.
Keeping them is the second.
Tottenham is giving us a live lesson.
The Lewis family has put another £120 million of capital into Spurs, taking recent funding to around £320 million.
Daniel Levy’s family interest sits further down the ownership chain.
If one shareholder keeps putting more money in and another does not, percentages change.
Nothing mysterious about it.
That is capitalism.
Now imagine the minority shareholder is a supporters’ trust.
Fans raise serious money.
They buy 5%.
Three years later the club needs another huge capital injection.
Can the fans follow their money?
If they cannot, 5% becomes 4%.
Then 3%.
Then 2%.
Soon everybody is still calling it fan ownership while the fans barely own anything.
That is why pre-emption rights matter.
But there is a trap here too.
The answer cannot be to borrow whatever it takes just to preserve the percentage.
That is madness.
You would be protecting the shareholding by weakening the football club.
A supporter structure needs a plan for the second cheque from day one.
Time to raise capital.
The right to participate.
Access to aligned outside money.
And a clear rule for what happens when supporters cannot follow.
Protect fans from avoidable dilution.
Do not protect them from dilution by pumping the club full of debt.
That is the warning.
Fan ownership needs a plan for the next capital raise, not just the first one.
Now look back at PROS
Put $250 million into a fund structured like PROS and you do not own 5% of Manchester United.
You own part of an investment vehicle.
The vehicle owns a portfolio.
That portfolio may contain public sports businesses and private sports investments.
You are buying exposure to the economics.
That can be a perfectly good investment.
But call it what it is.
Sports-price exposure.
It is not the same thing as club ownership.
And club ownership is still not the same thing as stewardship.
So when somebody says finance is “democratising sports ownership”, ask a better question.
What exactly has been democratised?
The return?
Or the power?
Private marks are not cash
There is another part of this story investors should care about.
PROS could put up to 15% into private sports investments.
Yet ETF shares trade every day.
That creates a tension.
Public markets want a price now.
Private markets often find the real price later.
A football club might be valued at $4 billion.
Great.
Can you sell it tomorrow morning for $4 billion?
Different question.
Private marks are not liquidity.
And the problem gets bigger as more money chases the same clubs.
There is still only one Manchester United.
More funds do not create more Manchester Uniteds.
They create more bidders.
Prices rise.
Then the next buyer needs to pay more.
Then the one after that needs to pay more again.
Soon the question stops being:
How much money does this business make?
It becomes:
How much will the next bloke pay me?
That is when you need to be careful.
Because when the next buyer becomes essential to the return, the next buyer has become part of the product.
Public money needs rights too
There is another cheque football likes.
The public one.
Stadium projects increasingly involve councils, transport, roads, land, tax breaks or other public support.
Fine.
But if taxpayers help increase the value of a privately owned sports asset, they should get something in return.
Not warm words.
Rights.
Public money for public rights.
Maybe that means community equity.
Maybe a covenant protecting the stadium.
Maybe repayment terms.
Maybe guaranteed community use.
Every deal will be different.
The principle should not be.
Private investors do not put money in and hope for the best.
Neither should the public.
The test is simple
Forget whether finance is good or bad for football.
That argument gets us nowhere.
Read the deal.
Is there a priced supporter allocation?
Who underwrites it?
What happens if fans cannot buy the whole thing?
Do they have pre-emption rights?
Is there a supporter director?
Who protects the ground?
Who protects the badge?
Who can actually enforce those rights?
What happens after a restructuring?
What happens if the club runs into financial trouble?
If public money goes in, what comes back?
Then ask the simplest question.
Are supporters being offered ownership?
Or are they being sold exposure to somebody else’s ownership?
That is the difference.
Wall Street is not wrong for seeing value in football clubs.
There is value.
Enormous value.
Grow it.
Invest in it.
Make money from it.
But if the next deal gives supporters no priced route into the equity, no protection from avoidable dilution and no enforceable rights over the institution they helped make valuable, stop telling us the community has been included.
It hasn’t.
It has been monetised.
Scott “Matchmaker” Michaels
I write about football ownership, governance, investment and the business behind the game.