Eight of the top 10 Premier League clubs are now owned by Americans. So are a third of all clubs across the four divisions of the English Football League. With the 2026 World Cup arriving on American soil this summer, U.S. investors have already conquered a different kind of field — Britain’s Premier League and the English football pyramid below it.
As we approach what sportswriters over there refer to as “the business end” of the 2025-2026 season, eight of the 10 clubs in the top half of the Premier League table are owned by Americans. Below them, in the English Football League’s “Championship” (as the pyramid’s second division is confusingly called), four of the eight clubs battling for promotion to the Premier League are U.S.-owned (including the feel-good Ryan Reynolds-Rob McElhenney Wrexham project and its Tom Brady-backed TV documentary rival, Birmingham City). And three of the top eight clubs in the division below them, League One (still confusing, I know), boast American owners. Overall, a majority of Premier League clubs are now in American hands, as are a third of the clubs in the three divisions below that comprise the English Football League.
It wasn’t long ago that one of America’s most cherished sports was bashing the world’s sport. Soccer was derided as staid and boring, when it wasn’t being characterized as a plot to alter our way of life, to be rejected by red-blooded Americans with the same vehemence we’d rejected such other foreign abominations as the metric system, Socialism, and Esperanto.
But today, European football, the English varietal in particular, is all the rage among our investing classes. What changed?
The Promotion/Relegation Bet
Well, it turns out the structure and culture of global football is the perfect fit for Wall Street’s animal spirits, offering a far higher-stakes competitive jolt than any American sport ever could to those addicted to competitive speculation and the pursuit of greater financial upside. Americans used to scoff at the existence of ties in soccer, and the lack of playoffs in most of its leagues, as evidence of a “wimp factor” in the game most associated with participation trophies among America’s youth.
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