American owners in the Premier League: the 2026 map

On 19 December 2024, The Friedkin Group completed the purchase of 98.8% of Everton and the Merseyside club became the tenth in the Premier League under majority American control. Back then it was still a headline. Eighteen months on it is not: in the 2025-26 season, eleven of the twenty clubs in the English top flight were in the hands of individuals, families or funds from the United States. That is more than half the shareholder dressing room of the richest league in the world.

Last season's turnover barely moved the needle. Arsenal won the title with 85 points, and West Ham United, Burnley and Wolverhampton Wanderers went down. Of those three, only Burnley had American ownership, in Alan Pace. And of the three who came up — Coventry City, Ipswich Town and Hull City — the one arriving with American money is Ipswich, owned by Gamechanger 20 Ltd, the vehicle behind which sits ORG Portfolio Management, a manager that runs money for Arizona's public safety pension fund. One out, one in, the count holds.

Who owns what, club by club

Manchester United remain the founding case. The Glazer family bought the club in 2005 for £790m through a leveraged buyout, loading much of the price onto the club itself as debt. Since 2024, Sir Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS have been minority shareholders and have run football operations, but the controlling stake still sits with the Glazers. In June 2026, Bloomberg reported that members of the family were looking at selling their holding. Worth stressing: that is a press report, and the club has announced no formal sale process.

Liverpool have belonged to Fenway Sports Group since October 2010, when John W. Henry paid £300m. Arsenal have been wholly owned by Kroenke Sports & Entertainment since August 2018, when Stan Kroenke bought Alisher Usmanov's 30% for £550m and took the club off the stock market. Chelsea changed hands in May 2022: the consortium led by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital closed the deal at a purchase price of £2.5 billion. Within that consortium, Clearlake retain 61.5%; the rest is split between Boehly, Mark Walter and the Swiss investor Hansjörg Wyss. The tension between Boehly and Clearlake over who buys out whom has run in the British press for years and was still unresolved in 2026.

The rest of the map, with the verified stakes:

• Aston Villa: V Sports, the vehicle of Egypt's Nassef Sawiris and the American Wes Edens, with roughly 34.4% each and the Atairos fund as a minority partner.
• Fulham: Shahid Khan, owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, since July 2013.
• Bournemouth: Black Knight Football Club, Bill Foley's group, since December 2022.
• Leeds United: 49ers Enterprises, the investment arm of the San Francisco 49ers, in full control since 2023.
• Crystal Palace: Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets, bought the 43% held by John Textor in 2025 at a reported price of £190m; Josh Harris and David Blitzer are also shareholders and chairman Steve Parish retains around 10%.
• Everton: The Friedkin Group, Dan Friedkin's company, with 98.8%.
• Manchester City: not an American club, but Silver Lake hold approximately 18% of City Football Group.

And below the Premier League the pattern is denser still: Wrexham with Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, Birmingham City with Knighthead Capital and Tom Brady as a minority partner, Norwich with Mark Attanasio, Portsmouth with Michael Eisner, Swansea City with American investors. American money is no longer only after the shop window; it is after the ladder.

The relegation discount

The useful question is not who is buying, but why they are buying here. The answer starts with the size of the business: Premier League revenues went from £205m in 1992 to around £6.1 billion three decades later, and the United States broadcast package, held by NBC Sports, is measured in billions of dollars. For an investor used to NFL franchises with an average value of around $5 billion, a historic English club with a global audience has for years been, quite simply, cheap.

Cheap for one specific reason: relegation. In American sport a franchise is a permanent seat. No team in the NFL, the NBA or MLB drops a division for playing badly; the worst team in the league picks first in the draft. In England that seat can be lost, and with it the broadcast income that underpins the valuation of the asset. That risk works as a discount on the purchase price, and it is at the same time the thing that unsettles the buyer most once the ink is dry.

Ipswich Town are the perfect demonstration. An Arizona pension fund watched its asset go up to the Premier League in 2024, come down a year later and go back up in 2026. No American financial model allows for the value of a franchise to swing like that on the strength of ninety minutes in May. It is exactly that volatility that explains everything which follows.

Franchise is the forbidden word

At Old Trafford, the supporter group The 1958 have spent years organising protests against the Glazers, including a sit-in inside the ground after a Manchester derby, after the club raised the season ticket price by 5% for 2025-26 despite calls for a freeze. The vocabulary of those protests never changes: debt, commercialisation and, above all, the charge of wanting to turn the club into a franchise.

The diagnosis needs sharpening, because the passport is not the relevant variable. What draws the anger is the financial structure, and that structure is not exclusively American. The Glazers bought with debt, yes, but Kroenke also financed his purchase of Usmanov's 30% with a loan of more than £550m from Deutsche Bank, while the Chelsea deal was executed with the consortium's own equity. Some American owners leverage and some do not. Sources spoken to by ESPN have also rejected the idea that there is a shared agenda among the American owners to import salary caps, drafts or competitive fixtures staged outside England.

The Super League that lasted 48 hours, and what it left behind

In April 2021, twelve clubs announced the European Super League. Six were English: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur. The project collapsed within days under pressure from supporters and the British government's threat to legislate against it. The six clubs later accepted a £22m settlement with the Premier League — around £3.5m each — plus a suspended fine of £25m and the threat of a 30-point deduction if they tried it again.

The appeal of the project was precisely the guaranteed, permanent membership: the franchise model transplanted to Europe. It is no accident that two of the three most heavily criticised English instigators had American owners. Nor is it an accident that the episode left consequences still alive in 2026. In December 2023 the European Court of Justice ruled that UEFA and FIFA's prior-authorisation rules breached competition law and amounted to an abuse of a dominant position. The judgment did not approve the Super League, but it removed the automatic veto. A22 relaunched the project in December 2024 as the Unify League, with 96 teams, four tiers, promotion and relegation and no permanent members; so far no major club has publicly committed to it.

The most durable consequence is a different one, and it is British. The Football Governance Act 2025 received royal assent on 21 July 2025 and created an independent regulator for the 116 clubs in the top five men's tiers in England, with a statutory owners' and directors' test whose first tranche came into force on 12 December 2025. Buying an English club is no longer only a question of price: there is a state body that decides whether the buyer is fit to own one.

"No English club was ever bought for the trophy: it was bought for the balance sheet, and the balance sheet depends on not going down."

Which is why the debate has changed shape. Nobody argues any more about whether American capital is coming, because it came and it stayed. The argument now is about what happens when a model built for closed leagues is applied to a competition where sporting failure destroys value for real. The eleven owners on the 2026 map learned that lesson in very different ways, and some are still paying for it.

Simulate the Premier League yourself

The boardrooms decide who owns the club; the pitch decides where it finishes in the table. That second part you can run for yourself:

• Simulate a full Premier League season and see how the final table lands.
• Check the supercomputer's title and relegation odds, calculated over 10,000 simulated seasons.
• Edit any result and watch the table recalculate instantly.
• Follow the FA Cup and Carabao Cup brackets round by round.