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American businessman John Texter has put around 40 percent of Crystal Palace up for sale, joining a growing list of Premier League clubs looking for new shareholders.
Tech entrepreneur Textor acquired a stake in Palace in 2021 for around £90 million and joined the four-person board that runs the south London-based team, alongside Apollo co-founder Josh Harris, Blackstone executive David Blitzer and club chairman Steve Parish.
Palace’s shares are now part of Textor’s multi-club network, Eagle Football, which also includes French football club Olympique Lyonnais, Rio-based Botafogo and Belgium’s RWD Molenbeek.
But after failing to secure a path to full ownership, Texter said he had hired commercial bank Reign Group to manage the sale of Palace’s shares. Although Eagle Football is the largest shareholder, Texter has equal voting power with the club’s three other directors.
Texter said he was “incredibly proud” to have helped Palace achieve “a level of sustainability that is extremely rare in the Premier League today”, but that his vision of running a multi-club network did not align with the club’s goals.
“Crystal Palace is an independent club,” he said in a statement to the Financial Times. “An integrated sports model like Eagle’s is simply not a perfect fit.”
Palace finished 10th in the Premier League this season after a strong final week under new manager Oliver Glasner, with a young and popular side featuring England internationals Eberechi Eze and Marc Guehi winning six of their final seven games.
The club is also due to shortly start construction work on a new stand which will increase the stadium’s capacity to 34,000, a project expected to cost more than £150 million and take around three years to complete.
Palace join a growing list of English top-flight clubs seeking new shareholders. Three other London-based clubs – Tottenham Hotspur, West Ham United and Brentford – are also looking for new investments. The future of Liverpool-based Everton is also uncertain, with a deal agreed last September to take over the club with 777 Partners hanging in the balance.
Texter said he wanted to reinvest the proceeds from the sale of Palace shares elsewhere and that English clubs were a key part of his long-held ambition to take Eagle Football on the stock market, with Everton being one of the clubs he would consider.
A number of European football club owners have recently been considering selling. The Glazer family put Manchester United up for sale, opting to sell a 27% stake to British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe late last year, while Liverpool’s owner Fenway Sports Group opted to sell a minority stake to a new sports-focused fund, Dynasty Equity, after considering a complete exit.
European football in 2022 has seen a string of record-breaking transactions, including the sale of Chelsea FC to a group of US investors for £2.5 billion, RedBird Capital Partners’ acquisition of AC Milan for €1.2 billion and Textor’s acquisition of Lyon for around €900 million. Mr Laing has acted as advisor to Chelsea, Lyon and United.
Since then, the European soccer broadcasting rights market has cooled, while interest rates globally have soared.
Italy’s Serie A recently agreed a TV-rights deal worth less than its previous pact and France has so far been unable to sell its domestic rights for next season, while the Premier League only just got a four percent increase in its new deals with Sky Sports and TNT Sports, but that was after a 40 percent increase in the number of matches on offer.
