Despite a season of enormous struggle on the pitch and much tumult off it, Everton are the 25th most valuable club in world football according to latest insights.
While the valuations of football clubs has been something of a bone of contention in more recent years due to the significant incline that they have seen, particularly in the Premier League, renowned US finance magazine Forbes has been a key driving force in presenting value estimations for sports teams across the globe.
Sports teams have been valued for some time by the rather perfunctory method of multiple of revenues, with that multiple far smaller for Premier League teams than it is for major American teams across sporting markets, particularly the NFL.
Forbes released its latest football team valuation report for 2023 recently, focusing on the most valuable football teams in world football. It was a list where Real Madrid ($6.07bn), Manchester United ($6bn), Barcelona ($5.51bn), Liverpool ($5.29bn) and Manchester City ($4.99bn) took the top five slots, with Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal making up the rest of the top 10.
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Everton, who managed to avoid the potentially catastrophic financial issue of relegation to the Championship after staying up on a dramatic final day of the season, are close to securing investment from New York-based firm MSP Sports Capital. Blues owner Farhad Moshiri and his representatives have been in discussions with MSP for some months around securing funding toward the final tranche of funding for the stadium build at Bramley-Moore Dock.
The deal is believed to be worth around £100m initially but with the potential for a further funds in exchange for more equity, will likely to see the American firm take a 25 per cent stake in the club through a preferential share structure, as well as providing a boardroom shake-up with two new faces of their own.
How much Everton are actually worth has been up for discussion, but a £100m deal for 25 per cent would suggest a £400m valuation on the football club. But Forbes’ valuation puts the Blues 25th out of 30 with a value of $744m (£597m). That would be a multiple of revenue of around three.
Of the 30 clubs featured in the 2023 Forbes list, Everton have seen the biggest decline in valuation year on year, down 21 per cent on its 2022 figure. They are one of only three clubs in the top 30 to have seen a valuation decline, the others being the crisis-hit Juventus and relegated Leicester City, who recorded declines of 12 per cent and 16 per cent, respectively.
Aston Villa, Leicester, Newcastle United, Crystal Palace and West Ham United are the other English clubs to be ahead of Everton in the valuations, while the rising popularity of America’s MLS can be seen by the Blues being behind four MLS franchises: New York City FC, LA Galaxy, Atlanta United and LAFC.
For the methodology, Forbes calculated team values are enterprise values (equity plus net debt) and include the economics of the team’s stadium (but exclude the value of the real estate itself), based on comparable transactions. Sources included the teams’ annual reports and documents, team executives and investors, credit rating agency reports, sports bankers and the annual Deloitte Football Money League report.
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