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US businessman John Textor has put his roughly 40 per cent stake in Crystal Palace up for sale, adding to the list of Premier League clubs in the hunt for new shareholders.
Textor, a tech entrepreneur, acquired his holding in Palace in 2021 for about £90mn, and joined Apollo co-founder Josh Harris, Blackstone executive David Blitzer and club chair Steve Parish on the four-person board that runs the south London-based team.
That stake in Palace is now part of Textor’s multi-club network Eagle Football, which also includes French club Olympique Lyonnais, Rio-based Botafogo and RWD Molenbeek in Belgium.
However, after failing to secure a path to full ownership, Textor said he had hired merchant bank Raine Group to manage the sale of his stake in Palace. Although Eagle Football is the largest shareholder, Textor has equal voting rights with the club’s three other directors.
Textor said that while he was “extremely proud” of his part in helping Palace achieve “a level of sustainability that is incredibly uncommon in today’s Premier League”, his vision for running a multi-club network was not aligned with the club’s goals.
“Crystal Palace is an independent club”, he said in a statement to the Financial Times. “An integrated sporting model, such as ours at Eagle, is simply not a perfect fit.”
Palace finished 10th in the Premier League this season, following a stellar run of results in the final weeks of the campaign under new manager Oliver Glasner. The team, which is packed with young, sought-after players including England internationals Eberechi Eze and Marc Guéhi, won six of the final seven fixtures.
The club is also due to start work imminently on a new stand that will increase capacity at its Selhurst Park stadium to 34,000, a project that is likely to cost upwards of £150mn and take around three years to complete.
Palace joins the growing list of top-flight English clubs seeking new shareholders, with three other London-based clubs — Tottenham Hotspur, West Ham United, and Brentford — all looking for fresh investment. The future of Liverpool-based Everton is also up in the air with 777 Partners’ deal to buy the club, agreed in September last year, in limbo.
Textor said he was keen to reinvest any proceeds from his stake in Palace elsewhere, with an English club seen as a key part of his long-held ambition to list Eagle Football on the stock market. Everton, he said, was among the clubs he would look at.
Many club owners across European football have explored selling up recently. The Glazer family put Manchester United on the market before choosing to sell a 27 per cent stake to British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe late last year, while Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group opted to sell a small stake to Dynasty Equity, a new sport-focused fund, having weighed up a full exit.
The wave of sales followed a year of record-breaking transactions in European football in 2022, including the sale of Chelsea FC to a group of US investors for £2.5bn, RedBird Capital Partners’ acquisition of AC Milan for €1.2bn, and Textor’s own purchase of Lyon for almost €900mn. Raine advised on Chelsea, Lyon and United.
Since then, the market for live football rights in Europe has cooled, while global interest rates have risen sharply.
Italy’s Serie A recently agreed a TV deal worth less than its previous contract, France has so far been unable to sell its domestic rights for next season, while the Premier League eked out a 4 per cent increase from its new deals with Sky Sports and TNT Sports, but only after a 40 per cent increase in the number of games on offer.