The Billionaires Club: The Unstoppable Rise of Football’s Super-rich Owners

by James Montague

Once upon a time football was run by modest local businessmen. Today it is the plaything of billionaire oligarchs, staggeringly wealthy from oil and gas, from royalty, or from murkier sources. But who are these new masters of the universe? Where did all their money come from? And what do they want with our beautiful game?

While almost cloaked in secrecy, the billionaire owner has to raise his head above the bunker when it comes to football ownership - a rare Achilles heel that allows access to worlds normally off limits journalists and outsiders. In the Billionaires Club James Montague delves deeper than anyone ever dared, to tell this story for the first time. He criss-crosses the world - from Dhaka to Doha, from China to Crewe, from St Louis to London, from Bangkok to Belgium - to profile this new elite, their network of money and their influence that defies geographic boundaries.

The Billionaires Club is part history of club ownership, part in-depth investigation into the money and influence that connects the super-rich around the globe, and part travel book as he follows the ever-shifting trail around the globe in an attempt to reveal the real force behind modern-day football.

At its heart The Billionaires Club is a football book, about some of the biggest clubs in the world. But it is also about something bigger: the world around us, the global economy, where the world is headed and how football has become an essential cog in this machine.

Genres: Football, Sports, Soccer, Business, Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

Published October 9, 2018

About the author

James Montague is an author and journalist from Chelmsford, Essex.

He has reported for the New York Times, BBC World Service, Delayed Gratification and The Blizzard, amongst others, and has reported from over 100 different countries and unrecognised territories.

He is the author of four highly-praised football books - When Friday Comes, Thirty One Nil, The Billionaires Club and 1312: Among the Ultras - and is a two time winner of Football Book of the Year at the British Sports Book of the Year awards.

His fifth book, Engulfed: How Saudi Arabia Bought Sport, and the World, will be published in the spring of 2025.

Reviews

[Finbarr · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was one term in this book that stuck with me: reputation laundering. Through the chapter on the Middle East, the detail of the human rights abuses in the UAE and Qatar and how the regimes there are using their football ownership, particularly through Man City and PSG, to spruce up their image in the west made me feel sick.

As an Arsenal fan, we're currently faced with a choice between a Walmart heir and corporate leach in Stan Kroenke and an Uzbek oligarch and human rights abuser, Alisher Uzmanov, as our owner. As much as it's difficult to not feel envious of clubs throwing petro-dollars around and spending billions on footballers in a bid to launder their reputations, I would welcome both of these billionaires walking out and a fan-based ownership structure to the club.

This book goes through the Asian, Russian, Middle Eastern and American owners who have plagued football. Montague is well-travelled and his books are very well researched. He writes persuasively and has convinced me for sure that these sorts of owners bring absolutely no good to the game. An eye-opening and, at times, harrowing read.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

From one group of owners to the next, the current class of wealthy football club owners demonstrate the worst of humanity: greed, corruption, criminals and human rights abusers.

[Andrei · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oluline, kuigi pisut ebaühtlane ülevaade sellest, kuidas maailma rikkad ja võimsad end läbi jalgpalli legitimeerivad. Vene oligarhidest Araabiamaade naftašeikideni ja Kagu-Aasia võimusoosikutest Ameerika riskikapitalistideni, on nimed nagu Abramovitš ja Kroenke ostnud üles märkimisväärse osa Euroopa tippklubidest. Montague ajakirjanduslik töö on kohati pisut pealiskaudne ja üldistused lihtsakoelised, ent kooruvad mustrid ise iga vutifänni jaoks hirmutavad. Mõnes mõttes on tegemist märgilise raamatuga eelmängust jalgpalliringkondi raputanud Superliiga sünnile ning elust maailma suurima spordiala heas uues ilmas. 3.5/5

[Adrian Fingleton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm probably being a bit charitable here with four stars. 3.5 might be more realistic, but I rounded up. It's an interesting book, split into sections about the rise of the oligarchs in Russia, US capitalist leverage (build be a free staium or I re-badge the St Louis X into the LA X), Chinese new money and other Asian executives with deep pockets. And finally the Oil-sheikhs and their random investments.

The author chronicles these mega-investors, and interviews a cross section of the migrant workers and 'old-time' fans whose lives are being diminished by these billionaires. The interviews are good, and ground the book in the realities. In fact some of the migrant worker stories have little to do with football, but are more about how the Middle East effectively buys slave labour from Bangladesh and other points East.

I somehow felt the book was less than the sum of it's parts. I'd like to have known what drives these mega-financiers. Do they actually like sport and invest to 'be a fan'. Or do they just perceive that with TV rights going thru the roof that they can get a great return on investment? It's ironic that with soaring ticket prices (and TV charges for pay per view) that 'real fans' cant see these games that the rich investors are supposedly bankrolling 'for the fans'. In fairness, its a book that opens up a lot of dark corners, and is to be applauded for that. I just felt it lacked a summary at the end, to tie it all together.

And, an unusual gripe. Despite the plethora of 'people who proofed the book, helped me write it, contributed critical opinions' etc etc as hailed by the author, there are way too many typos in there. I'd forgive the occasional one (and yes I know I make them myself too, but I'm not paid for this) but it's not a good omen when Ronald Reagan is called Ronald Regan early on. Does anyone involved in this book ever listen to the news. But the best of the lot is where an attempt is made early on in the book to describe a 'public vote' for some football-related event or other, and it comes out as a 'pubic vote'. Which goes to show that spellchecking is all very well, but there's no substitute for having someone you know eyeball the end product. Yellow card...

[Brendan Crowley · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The question is, at what point do we accept some culpability for humanising those who have played a role in dismantling the freedoms we hold dear, or even dismantling whole countries”

The Billionaires’ Club is an investigation into the new class of super rich owners who have snapped up many of the world’s biggest football clubs. Rather than being about the football business, the book is about the business interests of those billionaires who have been using their vast resources to reshape global football.

Montague digs deep into the business histories of a string of recognisable names questioning their motives for buying into football and at times our own culpability as football fans for ignoring their character and misdeeds.

Starting with Roman Abramovich at Chelsea, Montague examines the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs who have used investments in football to increase their visibility and profile, largely as an insurance policy against the consequences if they lose favour of their political allies back home. Possibly more troubling is the rising influence of Gazprom, the Russian natural gas giant, whose investments in football seem inextricably linked to the politics of the energy industry.

The book also covers the influx of owners in European football from the US, the Middle East and Asia.

The American owners are portrayed as arch capitalists who seek to make money and couldn’t care less about the fans or anyone else for that matter. It says a lot that they appear less troubling than many of the other owners. It was also interesting to see how much more liked Liverpool’s current owners were than Hicks and Gillett at a time when they are starting to make more and more noises for a European or

The Middle Eastern owners appear more troubling. The phrase “reputation laundering” seems very apt to describe the intentions of much of the investment in European football. Football clubs like Man City have become vehicles of foreign policy for members of Middle Eastern ruling families with questionable human rights records. Montague covers the abuses of migrant workers in some detail. He highlights the personal stories of poor Bangladeshi’s and the horrific ordeals they face trying to earn enough money to send home to their families.

The Asian owners covered appear more like the Russians – buying major clubs to appease their own political masters and to increase their political visibility abroad. The coverage of China’s changing relationship with football in the books really interesting – I had no idea the Chinese Premier’s passion for the game was directly responsible for the huge investment in the Chinese Super League.

I’ve been a huge fan of James Montague’s since I read his 2014 book Thirty-One Nil: The Amazing Story of World Cup Qualification. It’s clear he is a very good writer with an intense curiosity about the world which informs is work. The global nature of his writing makes him the ideal person to chronicle the global power shifts in football politics. The Billionaires’ Club is a sobering examination of modern football and those who shape it, but its a riveting, insightful and brilliant read.

All of my sports book reviews are available at https://allsportsbooks.reviews

[Steve Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

The term ‘ultra’ is used for the most hard-core, sometimes violent fans of football clubs. This book deals with the ‘ultras’ who are really perpetrating the damage on football. James Montague excoriates the ‘ultra-rich’ in this fine book. These ‘ultras’ are a small but exclusive club of men who control the modern game arguably for motives other than the game itself.

James Montague’s book I found un-put-downable; I managed it in a few short days and while I still love the game at times it makes itself very unloveable and the roll-call of men manipulating modern football are well-exposed here including Kroenke, Putin’s inner circle like Abramovich and Usmanov , Xi Jinping and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan plus a cast of supporting ‘ultras.’

The EPL club finances for 2016/17 have just been published and they make staggering reading - the two Manchester clubs alone have a combined player wage bill of £527,000,000 - yep, half a billion! The combined wage bill of the three relegated clubs in summer 2017 was £253,000,000. This may well not be sustainable, already some of the top spenders are wanting even more and there are more stirrings about a super-league in Europe maybe without the ‘moral hazard’ of relegation? Match-day fans suffer as they get priced out of the game, particularly the bedrock of younger fans, men and women now for whom top-flight football is becoming so expensive. I wonder if the EPL ‘bubble’ will burst? James Montague’s book hasn’t convinced me otherwise.

This book has made me think why is it that the ‘ultra-rich’ feel the need to make just another billion or so, or why they believe they can treat the fans in such a cruel way as exemplified in St. Louis by Kroenke. The contemptuous way in which the ‘ultras’ of the former Soviet Union and the U.A.E. treat, in turn, Ukrainians and migrant workers from Bangladesh, is described clearly and it is hard to see how any institution can now govern these modern-day horrors.

I happen to support a lower league club that also has, rather bizarrely, a Jordanian owner who came out of nowhere a couple of seasons back, but no real supporter involvement in the governance of the club or indeed millions injected into the club. Yet? Am I troubled by this - yes, but it is a conflicted yes and James Montague mentions in the book.

Well-researched, well-written and a good summary of where the game currently is and yes you could argue that it is only a matter of scale in that it has always been ‘rich men’ who have owned football clubs but I share a fear for the game that others have expressed too. More than that the horrors of warfare, human exploitation and disregard for fundamental human rights are being masked behind the ‘soft power’ of the top-flight football clubs.

[Gary Boland]

Thought-provoking investigation on how regimes (e.g. United Arab Emirates) and individuals (insert oligarch here) use well-known brands such as sports clubs to rehabilitate their image. This pattern is so successful that it has brought the World Cup to a country with indentured slavery as a fact of life (Qatar). Very worthwhile and not a book containing any sport.

[Ross H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read prior to FIFA 2020 World Cup in Qatar. A study of self promotion though sport. And how easily the system ignores it own rules.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are a lot of books about soccer on my shelves. Many of them are excellent and a glance at their spine triggers a happy recollection of time well spent discovering the hidden connective tissue that binds us all. And yet, even so, James Montague's books are singularly remarkable. "Thirty-one Nil" and "When Friday Comes" are two of the best books I've ever read in any genre, on any topic. "The Billionaires Club" is another incredible accomplishment by Montague, a book that is both a highly entertaining read and educational to boot; a book that is important, not just because of what it says about the sport, but what it reveals to the reader as the unvarnished state of our globalized markets. Big men, big egos, great games, leaving their imprint on billions of pawns. Montague, as is his specialty, does not sugarcoat the diagnosis but, nevertheless, provides it with an unshakeable optimism because, as he writes "[p]eople are good . . ." Except perhaps, as any Cubs fan could have told him, in St. Louis.

[Kieran Lancaster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before reading, I did think the book might be a bit dry, or a bit hard to follow. But I’m happy to say it’s anything but.

It’s conveniently split into 4 chunks - the Russians, the Americans, Asia and the Middle East. Each of which have distinct motivations for getting involved in the world of football, which is explained nearly and in an interesting way which gets to the heart of what fans are concerned about.

It really does give a clear insight into who the big and small clubs are owned by, and why the owners act in the way that they do, and why it’s showing no signs of stopping. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone interested in football off the pitch because it covers quite an broad an interesting topic in a very digestible way.

[Mario · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

I was interested in this book because my football team is owned by one of these billionaires spoken about in the book, Stan Kroenke. The kind of man who you want nowhere near your sports team from an ambition stand point, as all he cares about is profit. Ask the residents of St Louis, or those in Texas who became homeless when he bought out their land for his ranch and evicted them. And he's not even the worst person from this list, with people and nation's who commit human rights violations all over the place buying out football clubs all around the world to try and 'sports-wash' their reputation.

[Allan McCabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed the themes explored in the book, shining a light on some of the very shady owners of our beloved football teams and those involved in the game. Most football fans know the super rich owners of their clubs aren't squeaky clean, but when some of their practices are laid out in black in white they make for a pretty awful rap sheet.

A must-read for fans of any of Europe's 'super clubs' who aren't aware of the murky backgrounds of their owners.

The book was poorly edited in places though. There were a lot of instances where the author's long and tangential sentences should have been revised into something more readable. And it was littered with typos.

[Connor Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic read for anyone with a vague interest in football and I would be interested to see how it reads for someone without that football interest.

This is a deeply socially and politically responsible expose that uses football as the foreground to explore and shine a light on what is really going on behind the curtain and of the very tangible negative impact that comes as a result, while also acknowledging that these takeovers do bring positives as well as negatives.

Reading it after the Qatar World Cup took place was very interesting as hindsight only makes the information, interviews and takes in the book more poignant.

[Gašper Grošelj · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book mainly focuses on ex-Soviet Union, American, Chinese and Gulf State owners buying clubs from around Europe for personal gain. It focuses on their rise and motives behind the purchases, while also explaining the broader picture behind the men. But not only them but also all of the stakeholders, which are on the losing side of their success.

There is no real red line connecting the whole book as each segment (each group of owners) is its own chapter, the lack of which I feel like is what gives the book its charm and hence brings you a sense of the reality of these situations, rather than trying to align these individuals through some highly dubious connection.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not strictly a book on soccer/football. Rather Montague looks at the money behind the sport, the billionaires who have bought Premier League clubs. Focusing on four regions (Russia, America, China, the Middle East) he looks at the business dealings of these people/groups, and how they almost all have acquired their money in shady terms, and continue to work in questionable ways. Figures like Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea and a confident of Putin, Stanley Kroenke of Arsenal and various teams in the US, the Chinese billionaires aligned with the Communist Party, and the Middle Eastern royal families behind Manchester City and some of the worst human rights abuses in the world are covered. This is not a book that goes over key games and players, but instead looks at things like migrant workers, how these figures exploit taxpayers to build stadiums, and how sports are a political tool in many regions.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought the Middle East section of this book was fascinating, but most of the information from the Americas and Russia were things I’ve read about at least a little in the past. Still, it was an informative read and would be even more so for someone not immersed in this subject on a regular basis.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye opening expose of the rise of overseas investment in the English Premier League, and the murky backgounds of so many of the investors. Particularly liked the detours in the book exposing the questionable influence of some countries governments in these investments (see China; UEA). And also the chapter on Qatar.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

James weaves a path from Russian oligarchs and American billionaires to Chinese enterprises and Middle East kingdoms.

The concentration of wealth and greed represented by the first two are shocking enough. The later two, the state-sponsored rapaciousness and human rights abuses, are stomach churning. All these elements are intermingling in football and demonstrate a serious need for reforms all across the globe.

[john · Rating 4 out of 5]

Riveting account of the nefarious behavior and unstoppable rise of billionaires investing in football around the world. This book highlights the Russian, Middle Eastern, Asian and American owners who have plagued the global game and why they choose to launder their money through it. Montague is concise, well-travelled and this book insightful and well researched.

[Advait · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliantly exposes the ugly side of the beautiful game. An in-depth, well-researched exploration of football club's owners, their backgrounds, their motives and what's ahead for the sport. It includes many compelling stories, some heart-breaking and some heart-warming, about how clubs and fans have responded to the changing footballing landscape.

[Christian Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been following soccer for two years and don't know a ton about it's history but this book was fascinating. There are some really bad people behind the scenes on some of these clubs (specifically Chelsea and Manchester City).

[Dániel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really nice and informative beginning. After it we deep into politics, later I have no idea what is going on. Such a shame, that the author could not keep up with the tremendous first half of the book.

[Sara F · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not all about football. This book is mostly about corruption in business. They talk very little about actual teams and football clubs. Some of the description is a little disturbing when you get to the final section of the book. Easy to read and obviously well researched.

[Fritzov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scary book about the situation of todays top footy.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eye opening accounts of the stories behind Footballs Super Rich owners. Some pretty dry subject matter but is woven well together to keep it interesting.

[Jay Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great in-depth look into the murky world of sports club ownership!

[Eirik · Rating 5 out of 5]

A journalistic achievement, in every sense.

[Jonny Brick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why has China invested in clubs in Birmingham? Why did Abramovich buy Chelsea? What of the American investors? The set text on the worst league in the world, brilliantly told.

[Joseph Buckley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant

Fascinating and enlightening book on the owners and countries who now have significant influence on all levels of English and European football

[Bob Makin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important book to footy fans & the business behind it. Pleased we still have a local lad at the helm at Boro