How do you value a football club? – Athletic

Imagine you are looking for a new house. You want something modern and you know which part of the city you would like to live in – somewhere central and with growth potential.

You’re not ready to start touring places yet, so start searching online and you’ll quickly find something that looks right on the street and is almost within your budget.

Wait, what is this? The same place on a different website 15 percent more? Oh no, is that 70 percent more on this second website? Wow, here it is said that the owner only listens twice for the first price offers! How much does this place cost? Can I choose a price I like?

Imagine now that you are a Gulf state, a hedge fund boss or an oligarch and want to buy Tottenham Hotspur. Well, the club price tag follows the same path as the home of your dreams.

In its latest club appraisal report, released last January, global financial services firm KPMG used its “algorithm” to give Tottenham a value of just under £ 1.5 billion, making it the ninth most valuable in the world of football.

But three months later, U.S. business magazine Forbes published its annual list of the 20 most valuable football clubs. Spurs was in 10th place, but the price was closer to £ 1.7bn. Pretty close.

However, a year earlier, Kieran Maguire, a football economics specialist at the University of Liverpool, applied a tailored valuation method to all 20 Premier League teams using figures that were not distorted by COVID-19. This equation spit out a value of almost 2 pounds.