The Beautiful Asset

They put me in goal at Rosedale Elementary because I was the fat kid. That is the complete history of my soccer career. Youth soccer in early-nineties Salem, Oregon sorted players with elegant cruelty: the fast kids ran, the coordinated kids scored, and the big kid got stood in front of the net like a piece of furniture and told he was playing the most important position on the field.

I call the game kick and chase, and I believe in my bones that any contest that can end nil-nil has not finished being invented. The Premier League opened its most recent season averaging 2.48 goals a game, with twelve percent of early fixtures scoreless, twelve percent of customers paying full price to watch two teams jointly accomplish nothing. Last weekend's World Cup final, the most attended ever staged, went 106 minutes without a goal.

However, set everything I feel about soccer next to everything I know about it, and I am left with an uncomfortable conclusion: the sport I cannot stand may be the single best vehicle in the world for the thing I do for a living. Three reasons.

Sportico values the fifty most valuable clubs on earth at a combined $95.5 billion, led by Real Madrid at $7.7 billion. Underneath the headline, the table splits into two continents. European clubs, with all the history and all the revenue, trade at roughly four and a half times revenue. MLS clubs, with a fraction of the revenue and none of the history, trade at around nine. Toronto paid $10 million to join MLS in 2007. San Diego paid $500 million in 2023. The average MLS club is now worth $767 million, up 39 percent in five years.

Why does the league with the worse soccer carry the better multiple?

No relegation, so there is a floor under every franchise. Salary caps, so there is a ceiling on the largest expense. Revenue sharing and central media money, so the cash flows are smoothed. League-controlled expansion, so scarcity is manufactured on purpose. An American franchise is a stabilized asset. A European club is a beautiful, volatile, century-old institution whose value can move in either direction, Manchester United's fell two percent last year, a sentence that is unremarkable in England and close to impossible here. The twenty Premier League clubs lost £795 million before tax in the 2024-25 accounts, fourteen of them in the red, Chelsea setting the record at £262 million, while playing the most-watched domestic soccer on the planet.

Here is the part I have to retract. I have long said soccer lacks a warrior mentality; as an investor I take it back, because relegation is the most brutal mechanism in professional sports. In America the worst team is rewarded with the first pick and a lecture about patience. In England it is fired into a lower division, its revenue torched, and handed parachute payments so the fall does not kill it. Sometimes it does anyway. Bury, a club older than the penalty kick, ceased to exist in 2019. And that jeopardy is also content. Wrexham was bought for $2.5 million, won three straight promotions, grew revenue 28x, and in December sold a piece to Apollo Sports Capital off a reported $475 million valuation. The escalator stopped this spring, seventh in the Championship, promotion lost on the final day in a nil-nil draw with Middlesbrough. Even Wrexham's heartbreak finished scoreless. The drama I claimed the sport lacked turned out to be the value engine.

The case for soccer as the maximum version of sports urbanism starts with the schedule. An NFL team gives a district eight or nine home dates a year. A club playing league, cup, and continental fixtures gives you twenty-five to thirty, many of them midweek nights that light up a neighborhood on a Tuesday in February when nothing else will. And a century of history built these churches in the middle of town: English grounds sit embedded inside neighborhoods, walkable, transit-fed, surrounded by the exact urban fabric American teams spend billions trying to fake in a parking lot.

The academies do the same work at street level. Benfica has generated €743 million in transfer profit over the past decade running a school that turns neighborhood kids into nine-figure athlete contracts. Additionally, an academy embeds a club in its city and gives every family in the zip code a reason to believe the institution belongs to them. American franchises, which trade players like inventory and threaten to relocate every time a lease comes up, have never held that kind of social license.

Then there is Birmingham. Knighthead Capital bought Birmingham City in 2023, Tom Brady took a stake and the chairmanship of the advisory board, the club promptly got relegated, impossible in America, just another Tuesday in England, and then came straight back up, winning League One with a record 108 points. That is the stabilization play at field level: American capital absorbing the system's volatility and converting it into momentum.

But the field is the smaller half of the story. The club's planned 62,000-seat stadium anchors a £3 billion Sports Quarter on 48 acres of former industrial land in Bordesley Green, where child poverty runs above fifty percent in places. Every mayor and athletic director in America should sit up for this next part: the British government is treating it as regeneration policy, not a stadium deal. The Chancellor committed £2.4 billion to West Midlands transport, unlocking a metro extension to the site. In May the regional mayor launched an £11 billion Mayoral Development Corporation with the Sports Quarter at its heart. A government asked what could anchor the revival of one of the poorest places in the country, and the answer was a soccer club. Not a tech campus. Not a tax incentive. A club, because a club is the one institution the community already believes in.

If the men's game is the thesis, the women's game is the trade still sitting there at list. The NWSL has the American structure, a closed league, controlled expansion, no relegation, and none of the American saturation. Average valuations rose 77 percent in eighteen months, expansion fees went from $2 million to $205 million in five years, and the most valuable club in the league, Angel City, carries a $335 million mark.

Kansas City has already run the whole experiment once. The Current built CPKC Stadium for $140 million, the first stadium in the world built for a professional women's team, put it on the riverfront, and the franchise around it is now marked at $315 million. The building cost less than half what the club is worth, and the club is worth what it is largely because of the building.

One caution, because it will be in every deck this fall: do not pay a World Cup premium. The tournament broke every gate record on file, 6,810,966 tickets across 104 matches, nearly double the 1994 mark, but it was awarded in June 2018, and every asset in this essay repriced in the eight years between the announcement and the anthem.

What actually moved these assets was closed-league structure, new stadiums, and above all Messi, whose arrival took Inter Miami's revenue from roughly $56 million to roughly $200 million. Meanwhile the host cities each carried an estimated $100 million to $200 million in security and logistics costs against a collective shortfall pegged as high as $250 million, and the trophy was lifted in a parking lot in East Rutherford, eight miles from Manhattan and a planet away from the High Road.

So here is where the fat kid from Rosedale lands. Our thesis has always been that the team is the volatile, emotional thing you respect from a distance, and the ground underneath it is the durable thing you own, and no sport on earth offers more ground, deeper civic roots, or a wider gap between the quality of the product and the price of the structure around it. Europe perfected the beautiful game. America perfected the boring machinery that keeps a beautiful thing solvent. Bolting the second onto the first does not touch the offside rule or the kid in the academy. It just builds the world around the game that the game has always deserved, and collects rent on it.

Thirty years ago they stood me next to a goal because nobody wanted me anywhere else on the field. I just needed to stop guarding the net and start pricing the land under it.

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Not investment advice. From the Desk Of is a personal column produced by Momentous Sports for educational purposes only. It reflects the author's personal views and is not an offer to sell or solicitation to buy securities; any offering by Momentous Sports will be made solely to verified accredited investors under Rule 506(c) of Regulation D and only through formal offering documents. Consult your own advisors. Past performance is not indicative of future results. References to club and league valuations (including Sportico figures), Premier League financial results, MLS and NWSL expansion fees, Wrexham, Birmingham City and the Birmingham Sports Quarter, CPKC Stadium, and 2026 FIFA World Cup attendance and cost estimates are drawn from public reporting and are presented as-is with no warranty of accuracy or completeness. Disclosure: Momentous Sports Group actively invests in sports-anchored real estate.

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