The Multi-Club Ownership Model Nigeria Was Told to Copy Just Collapsed

The PIF football landscape

Multi-club ownership has been the defining business model of the modern football economy — Red Bull first, City Football Group close behind, and a wave of private capital following. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) entered that landscape decisively: the 2021 acquisition of Newcastle United for roughly £300 million, followed by the launch of a formal project in June 2023 to grow the Saudi Pro League’s (SPL) revenue from SAR 450 million to over SAR 1.8 billion annually and its market value to over SAR 8 billion. PIF has since taken 75% ownership of four top-flight clubs — Al Ittihad, Al Ahli, Al Nassr and Al Hilal — as part of a broader privatisation drive.

The recruitment strategy that followed — Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema, Neymar, and a run of marquee signings — was always understood as a visibility play rather than a football one: Al Nassr’s Instagram following grew from 864,000 to over 15 million after Ronaldo’s arrival. Newcastle’s on-pitch turnaround has been real and sustained — a club fighting relegation before the takeover finished fourth in the Premier League within two seasons of PIF ownership and has remained a genuine European contender since.

What didn’t hold up

Two things this piece originally pointed to as the model for how a sovereign-backed football investor operates have not aged well. Liverpool rejected Al Ittihad’s £150 million bid for Mohamed Salah in the closing days of the 2023 summer window; a follow-up push never materialised, Salah signed a new long-term deal at Anfield, and he remains a Liverpool player. The pursuit illustrated PIF’s ambition, not its reach — a distinction worth keeping in view when assessing what SPL clubs can realistically extract from Europe’s top leagues.

More significant is what happened to 777 Partners, the Miami-based investment firm this piece cited alongside City Football Group as a template for a PIF-led African multi-club network. Between 2021 and 2023, 777 built a rapid portfolio — Genoa, Standard Liège, Vasco da Gama, Red Star, a stake in Hertha Berlin — funded largely by debt. By April 2024, with a 777-owned airline in administration and creditors circling, its proposed takeover of Everton collapsed; by October 2024 the whole portfolio was on the sales block, and a lawsuit from one of its own creditors accused a co-founder of running the operation as “an outright Ponzi scheme.” Vasco da Gama lost its board to a Rio court ruling suspending the takeover contract entirely.

777 Partners was cited as proof the multi-club model works. What it actually proves is that debt-funded expansion without a sustainable revenue base does not survive contact with reality. The lesson for a PIF-Nigeria structure is not that multi-club ownership is unworkable — City Football Group’s network remains healthy — but that the model only survives where the parent entity’s capital base is genuinely deep and patient, which is precisely PIF’s advantage over a leveraged private fund like 777. The due diligence a Nigerian club or the NPFL Board would need to run on any prospective investor should treat 777’s collapse as the template for what to screen out, not what a fast-moving multi-club entrant looks like.

The Emenalo chapter has closed

Michael Emenalo’s appointment as the SPL’s Chief Football Executive was, at the time, the clearest institutional bridge between Riyadh and Lagos — a former Nigerian international running the league’s Player Acquisition Centre of Excellence. That term has since concluded; the SPL announced the successful completion of his contract in mid-2026, thanking him for his role in the league’s transformation. Whatever informal advocacy for Nigerian talent his position afforded, it no longer exists in that form.

This is worth treating as a structural lesson rather than a setback. A single well-placed individual is not a substitute for an institutional relationship between the NPFL Board and the SPL or PIF directly — the kind of arrangement that survives personnel turnover on both sides. Any renewed push for Nigerian-Saudi football cooperation should be pursued government-to-federation or board-to-board, not through a personal relationship with whoever currently holds an SPL executive role.

What Nigeria should actually take from this

The structural argument this piece made in 2023 — that Nigerian clubs need to be privatised and professionally structured before any serious foreign investor, PIF included, would consider a majority stake — has not weakened. If anything, the 777 Partners collapse strengthens it: a serious investor doing proper diligence on a Nigerian club needs the same clean corporate structure, audited books and asset register that 777’s failure suggests even sophisticated Western investors sometimes skip at their own peril.

The NPFL Board’s own recent commercial discipline — including a ₦2.14 billion, five-year broadcast and data-commercialisation deal signed in November 2025 — is exactly the kind of institutional groundwork that makes a future PIF conversation credible rather than aspirational.

Conclusion

PIF’s football ambitions remain real and well-capitalised; what has changed is the cast of characters and the cautionary evidence around how not to build a multi-club network. Nigerian football’s path into that conversation still runs through privatisation, clean governance and institutional relationships — not through star signings or a single well-connected executive. The league’s own recent commercial moves suggest that groundwork, however slowly, is finally underway.